Geoffrey Hinton

The government should insist that the big companies do lots of safety experiments, spend considerable resources like a third of their compute resources on doing safety experiments while these things are still not as intelligent on us to see how they might evade control and what we could do about it. And I think that's a lot of the debate at OpenAI. The people interested in safety like Ilya Sutskever wanted significant resources to be spent on safety. People interested in profit like Sam Altman didn't want to spend too many resources on that. source Unverified

I used to think it was a long way off, but I now think it's serious and fairly close [...] The alarm bell I’m ringing has to do with the existential threat of them taking control. source Unverified

Let's open source nuclear weapons too to make them safer. The good guys (us) will always have bigger ones than the bad guys (them) so it should all be OK. (2023) source Verified

GH: I’m an expert on trying to get the technology to work, not an expert on social policy. One place where I do have technical expertise that’s relevant is [whether] regulators should insist that you can explain how your AI system works. I think that would be a complete disaster. People can’t explain how they work, for most of the things they do. When you hire somebody, the decision is based on all sorts of things you can quantify, and then all sorts of gut feelings. People have no idea how they do that. If you ask them to explain their decision, you are forcing them to make up a story. Neural nets have a similar problem. When you train a neural net, it will learn a billion numbers that represent the knowledge it has extracted from the training data. If you put in an image, out comes the right decision, say, whether this was a pedestrian or not. But if you ask “Why did it think that?” well if there were any simple rules for deciding whether an image contains a pedestrian or not, it would have been a solved problem ages ago. (2017) source Unverified