Toronto's pioneer of artificial intelligence quits Google to openly discuss dangers of AI

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who studies neural networks used in artificial intelligence applications, poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

A Toronto professor considered to be a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence announced his departure from Google on Monday so that he could openly discuss the “dangers of AI.”

Geoffrey Hinton, professor at the University of Toronto and the “godfather” of deep learning – a field of artificial intelligence that mimics the human brain – announced his departure from the company on Monday citing the desire to freely discuss the implications of deep learning and artificial intelligence, and the possible consequences if it were utilized by "bad actors."

Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist, is best-known for a series of deep neural network breakthroughs that won him, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio the 2018 Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing.

“I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google," Hinton said on Twitter, adding that "Google has acted very responsibly" in its implementation of the technology.

Google confirmed the 75-year-old’s departure to CTV News Toronto on Monday, saying the now-former employee has “retired” from his role.

“Geoff has made foundational breakthroughs in AI, and we appreciate his decade of contributions at Google," Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean said in a statement on Monday.

Hinton's departure comes at a time when a number of notable industry leaders have shown signs of wariness towards the technology. In March, Elon Musk co-signed a letter with nearly three thousand others demanding a pause on AI research for at least six months, in order to develop safety protocols. Aside from being the Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Musk co-founded OpenAI, the research lab that created ChatGPT and GPT-4.

While Hinton did not sign the open letter, he told The New York Times on Monday he found it “hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”

Hinton has been invested in the now-hot topic of artificial intelligence since its early stages. In 1970, he got a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology from Cambridge, followed by his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence in Edinburgh, U.K. in 1978.

He joined Google after spearheading a major breakthrough with two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto in 2012, in which the team uncovered and built a new method of artificial intelligence: neural networks. The team's first neural network was  incorporated and sold to Google for $44 million.

Neural networks are a method of deep learning that effectively teaches computers how to learn the way humans do by analyzing data, paving the way for machines to classify objects and understand speech recognition.

Since 2013, Hinton had been splitting his time between Google in Mountain View and Toronto.

CTV News Toronto reached out to Hinton for further comment but has yet to receive a response.

With files from The Canadian Press.