Hours after the artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize in physics, he drove a rented car to Google's California headquarters to celebrate.
“This is really a testament to the power of computer science and artificial intelligence,” said Jeanette Wing, a professor of computer science at Columbia University. Such work started well before Google existed. But a bountiful tech industry has now made it easier for AI scientists to pursue their ideas even as it has challenged them with new ethical questions about the societal impacts of their work.
Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, told the AP in an interview Wednesday his dream was to model his research laboratory on the “incredible storied history” of Bell Labs. Started in 1925, the New Jersey-based industrial lab was the workplace of multiple Nobel-winning scientists over several decades who helped develop modern computing and telecommunications.
By the time the sleep-deprived scientist reached the Google campus in nearby Mountain View, he “seemed pretty lively and not very tired at all” as colleagues popped bottles of champagne, said computer scientist Richard Zemel, a former doctoral student of Hinton’s who joined him at the Google party Tuesday.
An hour before the party, Hinton used his Nobel bully pulpit to throw shade at OpenAI during opening remarks at a virtual press conference organized by the University of Toronto in which he thanked former mentors and students.Asked to elaborate, Hinton said OpenAI started with a primary objective to develop better-than-human artificial general intelligence “and ensure that it was safe.”