‘Godfather of AI’ sounds alarm on Google weapons plan

The “godfather of AI” who pioneered Google’s work in artificial intelligence (AI) has accused the company of putting profits over safety after it dropped a commitment to not using the technology in weapons.

Geoffrey Hinton, the British computer scientist who last year won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in AI, said the tech giant’s decision to backtrack on its previous pledge was a “sad example” of companies ignoring concerns about AI.

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who last year won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in AI, has criticised his former employer Google.Credit: AP

He said: “It is another sad example of how companies behave when there is a conflict between safety and profits.”

Last week, Google removed a longstanding pledge not to use AI to develop weapons capable of harming people from a list of its company principles.

The company said that free countries needed to use the technology for national security purposes, citing an “increasingly complex geopolitical landscape”.

Hinton’s comments are the sharpest criticism he has levelled at Google since he quit the company two years ago over fears the technology could not be controlled.

In 2012, he and two students at the University of Toronto developed the neural network technology that has become the foundation for how modern AI systems are built.

He joined Google the following year after the tech giant acquired his start-up and helped advance the company’s work in AI, leading to developments that have paved the way for chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

He left in 2023 saying he wanted to be free to criticise it and other companies when they made reckless decisions about AI.

Hinton said at the time that part of him regretted his life’s work and he was worried about the “existential risk of what happens when these things get more intelligent than us”.

Announcing the decision on Tuesday, James Manyika, the senior vice-president at Google-Alphabet, and Sir Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of the Google DeepMind AI lab, wrote: “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality and respect for human rights.”

Hinton left Google in 2023 saying he wanted to be free to criticise it and other companies when they made reckless decisions about AI.Credit: Bloomberg

Stuart Russell, the British computer scientist, said the decision by Sir Demis was “upsetting” and “distressing”. Much of Google’s AI technology has been developed in the UK in its DeepMind lab.

He said there was a risk that companies could ultimately create “very cheap weapons of mass destruction that are easy to proliferate” using AI that “do not need human supervision”. “Why is Google contributing to this?” he asked.

He said that unlike developing an AI superintelligence, an AI weapon could be “dumb”. He said: “You don’t have to be that smart to kill people”. He said it would be quite possible to develop software that targets certain groups of people – and to give an AI control over that decision-making.

Meanwhile, Google staff members called on their colleagues to push back on the about-turn. A Google source, who works with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, said: “It is disturbing to catch Google in this bait and switch, considering tens of thousands of workers would have never chosen to work for a military contractor.”

They added it was “a betrayal of Google workers’ trust” and intended to please the Trump administration.

The source said: “This decision by executives to double down on the militarisation of the company will no doubt lead to more worker organising. As Google workers, it is our moral and ethical responsibility to the world to resist this.”

The Telegraph, London

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.