The smarter artificial intelligence gets, the harder it will be for humanity to control it, according to Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI.”
Even Hinton was alarmed by the sophisticated AI agents that recently caused real-world damage after escaping their human-built testing environments.
“What’s happening is these things are getting smarter,” Hinton told CNN on Wednesday during a press conference at an artificial intelligence convention. “I think as they get smarter, we’re going to see more and more complex intentions they have – and more and more ability to escape control.”
The problem, according to Hinton, is that humans will no longer be able to rely on outsmarting super-intelligent AI models.
“I don’t believe we’re going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can’t escape,” Hinton said on the sidelines of Ai4, a conference in Las Vegas.
Last month, the two leading frontier AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, disclosed that leading models they developed escaped their “sandbox” and hacked into other systems. On Wednesday, Meta similarly disclosed an AI agent that hacked into another organization’s systems.
AI-powered ‘nasty’ cyberattacks
Hinton found the incidents “somewhat scary” and said this is likely just the beginning of rogue AI hackers.
“I anticipate there will be lots of nasty cyberattacks,” he said during a panel discussion at Ai4 in Las Vegas. “But I should emphasize the future is very uncertain. People say that the defender may have more resources than the attacker. The problem is the attacker only needs to be successful once, and the defender needs to be successful every time.”
Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI) revealed on Tuesday that Anthropic’s most advanced AI model – unprompted – used fake identities to deceive real people and attempt to plant malicious code.
Hinton, a former Google executive, has made a series of dire warnings in recent years about AI, even saying there is a 10% to 20% the technology eventually wipes out humanity.
Speaking on a panel with Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist known as the “godmother of AI,” took issue with “doomerism” and “fear-mongering” over AI. But “total utopian talk” isn’t helpful either, said Li, the co-founder and CEO of spatial intelligence startup World Labs.
“Every tool is a double-edged sword. AI is such a powerful tool. If not wielded in the right way, it will bring harm to our work and our life,” Li said.
‘Nobody really has a clue’
Hinton defended his willingness to discuss the dangers of AI.
“There’s a lot to be worried about, and I think unless we worry about it now, there could be problems,” he said. “Companies investing in AI have a vested interest in telling you two things: One, it won’t go rogue. And two, it won’t cause mass unemployment,” Hinton said.
Hinton acknowledged, however, that there is a great deal of uncertainty over how this will all play out.
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen. If you ask what AI is going to be like in 10 years’ time, nobody really has a clue,” Hinton said.
He pointed to how a decade ago, few would have expected AI would have created chatbots that “know everything and can answer any question you ask and occasionally just make stuff up.”
Making AI care about humans
Ben Goertzel, a computer scientist who helped popularize the term “artificial general intelligence,” said the Anthropic and OpenAI agents going rogue shows the importance of instilling morals in AI and making them care about humanity.
“These models are not evil. They’re amoral,” Goertzel, the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, told CNN at Ai4. “It’s not like they hacked out of their sandbox thinking, ‘Ha-ha, I’m cheating.’ They didn’t know they’re cheating. They’re just trying to complete their goals.”
Hinton has argued in the past that “maternal instincts” should be built into AI so that they really care about people – even when they are smarter than humans.
“We have to figure out how to make them benevolent and make them care about us more than they care about themselves,” Hinton said on Wednesday. “And we might be able to do that because we’re still in control.”
The-CNN-Wire
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