AI Is a More Urgent Threat to the World Than Climate Change 🌡️

Artificial intelligence is truly turning out to be a tale of two cities.

With the launch, and subsequent success, of OpenAI's ChatGPT, the world has split into two distinct camps: on one hand, you have the "doomsday bros" who fear the rise of the machines and are warning of an impending end (or at the very least, replacement) of the human species as we know it. On the other hand, we have the "wield-it bros" who are heralding the launch of AI as the next industrial revolution and seek to benefit and profit off of it.

As the world at large grapples with the implications of artificial intelligence, the person responsible for giving birth to AI as we know it is sounding the alarm, calling the rise of machines a more urgent threat to the world than climate change.

Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfathers of AI", is the co-author of a seminal paper that represented a milestone in the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. He recently quit Google-parent Alphabet to espouse the threat posed by AI, perhaps because he knew the same fate would befall him as the senior software engineer who claimed Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.

Free from his employer's grips, Hinton has been sharing his thoughts, unfiltered, to the media at large, and recently told Reuters that the AI threat "might end up being more urgent" than climate change.

"With climate change, it's very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it's not at all clear what you should do," Hinton said.

Suffice to say, Hinton is part of the "doomsday bros" group, which includes the likes of Elon Musk. While it is easy to shrug Musk's comments about AI, particularly considering that he's developing his own generative AI model, the same cannot be said about Hinton who rubbished an open letter signed by thousands, including Musk, to temporarily pause development of systems more powerful than OpenAI's recently-launched GPT-4.

“It’s utterly unrealistic,” he said. “I'm in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, and it’s close enough that we ought to be working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it.”

Hinton's comments come just days after the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI met with the Biden administration to chart a path forward for AI. Ironically, the White House has tasked the companies themselves to "ensure the safety and security of their products", as if self-regulation is going to work. Nonetheless, the administration warned the companies that it would be open to new regulations and legislation to cover artificial intelligence.

AI has been a boon for Microsoft. The company reaped billions more in profit during the first quarter of the year thanks to its deep partnership with OpenAI, which let it roll out generative AI capabilities across its suite of products soon after ChatGPT became public. Those capabilities made Microsoft's products more attractive to enterprise customers, who are always a sucker for streamlining and automating their processes.

On the other hand, AI has been a curse for Google, which is so terrified by the rise of ChatGPT that it fears its entire existence may be under threat. The fact that Google is lagging behind Microsoft has spelled disaster for both the company and its CEO Sundar Pichai.

Meanwhile, the likes of Amazon and Meta are trying to cash in on the potential of AI, offering services powered by their own takes on generative AI models to reap some of that sweet AI profit. All of this must be quite horrifying to Hinton, who has already said he regrets his life's work

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton said during a lengthy interview with The New York Times.

Perhaps, to Hinton, it's a race to the bottom to see who gets to destroy humanity first.

Microsoft ranked #67 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings this week. Google was #4; Meta was #23; and Amazon was #70.

In Other News.. 📰

• Nintendo isn't selling as many Switch as it used to. Sales of the company's wildly successful console were down 22.1% in the year ended March 31st. The company ranked #84 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings this week.
• AI can now create music! Spotify has removed tens of thousands of songs that it believed were generated using AI. The removal has more to do with copyright more so than the fact that the songs were created using machines.
• $100 million: the amount Google is paying The New York Times to feature its content.
• Airbnb will now let users rent out single rooms.
• Utah now requires users to verify their age before visiting adult websites.
• LinkedIn cut more than 700 jobs as part of its decision to leave China.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon