AI“教父”辞职谷歌，公开谈论AI风险
文摘
科技
2023-05-07 12:12
美国
英国《金融时报》网站于2023年5月5日发表题为《人工智能“教父”杰弗里·辛顿为何从谷歌辞职，公开谈论AI风险？》的文章。以下观点不代表任何译者立场，现将全文翻译如下：Why AI’s ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton quit Google to speak out on risks人工智能“教父”杰弗里·辛顿为何从谷歌辞职，公开谈论AI风险？Professor voiced fears that rapid advance of technology would lead to significant job losses and flood of misinformation教授担心技术的快速发展将导致大量工作岗位流失以及虚假信息泛滥。![]()
AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton © Chloe Ellingson/New York Times/Redux/eyevine
AI“教父”杰弗里·辛顿
Madhumita Murgia in London and Richard Waters in San Francisco MAY 5 2023When Geoffrey Hinton had an ethical objection to his employer Google working with the US military in 2018, he didn’t join in public protests or put his name on the open complaint letter signed by more than 4,000 of his colleagues. 2018年，谷歌与美国军方的合作引发了杰弗里·辛顿的道德反感，但他并未公开抗议。他的四千多名同事联名抗议，他也未在信中留下自己的名字。Instead, he just spoke to Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder. “He said he was a bit upset about it too. And so they’re not pursuing it,” Hinton said in an interview at the time.相反，他只是和谷歌联合创始人谢尔盖·布林谈了一下，“他说他也有些不爽，所以他们就放弃合作了。”辛顿当时在接受采访时说。The incident is symbolic of Hinton’s quiet influence in the artificial intelligence world. The 75-year-old professor is revered as one of the “godfathers” of AI because of his formative work on deep learning — a field of AI that has driven the huge advances taking place in the sector. 这件事象征着辛顿在AI领域的悄然影响力。这位75岁的教授因为在深度学习领域的开创性工作而被尊为“AI教父”，正是深度学习推动了AI领域的巨大进步。But the anecdote also reflects Hinton’s loyalty, according to those who know him well. On principle, he never aired any corporate grievances, ethical or otherwise, publicly. 这段轶事也反映了辛顿的忠诚，据了解，他原则上决不公开表达任何对公司的不满，不管是道德还是其他方面。It was this belief that led him to quit his role of vice-president and engineering fellow at Google last week, so that he could speak more freely about his growing fears about the risks of AI to humanity. 正是这种信念导致他上周辞去了谷歌副总裁和工程研究员的职务，这样他就能更自由地谈论他越来越担心AI对人类的风险。Yoshua Bengio, his longtime collaborator and friend, who won the Turing Prize alongside Hinton and Yann LeCun in 2018, said he had seen the resignation coming. “He could have stayed at Google and spoken out, but his sense of loyalty is such that he wouldn’t,” said Bengio.他的长期合作伙伴和朋友约书亚·本吉奥，在2018年与辛顿和杨立昆一起获得了图灵奖。他说他早就知道辛顿会辞职。“他本可以留在谷歌讲出他的观点，但他的忠诚感太强了。”Hinton’s resignation follows a series of groundbreaking AI launches over the past six months, starting with Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November and Google’s own chatbot, Bard, in March.从去年11月微软支持的OpenAI推出ChatGPT，到今年3月谷歌推出自己的聊天机器人Bard，过去六个月有一系列开创性的AI应用推出，紧接着辛顿就辞职了。Hinton voiced concerns that the race between Microsoft and Google would push forward the development of AI without appropriate guardrails and regulations in place.辛顿担心微软和谷歌之间的竞争会推动AI在缺乏适当防范与监管的条件下发展。“I think Google was very responsible to begin with,” he said in a speech at an EmTech Digital event on Wednesday, after his resignation was made public. “Once OpenAI had built similar things using . . . money from Microsoft, and Microsoft decided to put it out there, then Google didn’t have much choice. If you’re going to live in a capitalist system, you can’t stop Google competing with Microsoft.”在上周公开辞职后，他在EmTech Digital活动上的发言称：“首先我觉得谷歌非常负责任，但OpenAI使用微软的资金开发了那类产品，然后微软决定公开发布，那么谷歌就没有太多选择了。既然生活在资本主义的体系中，你就无法阻止谷歌和微软竞争。”Since the 1970s, Hinton has pioneered the development of “neural networks”, technology that attempts to imitate how the brain works. It now underpins most of the AI tools and products we use today, from Google Translate and Bard, to ChatGPT and autonomous cars.七十年代以来，辛顿一直引领着“神经网络”的发展，这种技术尝试模仿大脑的工作方式，现在支持着我们今天使用的大多数AI工具和产品，从谷歌翻译和Bard，到ChatGPT和自动驾驶汽车。But this week, he acknowledged fears about its rapid development, which could result in misinformation flooding the public sphere and AI usurping more human jobs than predicted.但是本周，他承认了对神经网络迅速发展的担忧，这可能会导致虚假信息洪水般涌入公共领域，AI取代比预期要多的人类工作。“My worry is that it will [make] the rich richer and the poor poorer. As you do that . . . society gets more violent,” said Hinton. “This technology which ought to be wonderful . . . is being developed in a society that is not designed to use it for everybody’s good.” 辛顿表示：“我担心它会让富人更富，穷人更穷。如果是这样……社会会变得更加暴力。这项技术本应造福人类……但当前社会并没有用它造福所有人。”Hinton also rang an alarm bell about the longer-term threats posed by AI systems to humans, if the technology was given too much autonomy. He’d always believed this existential risk was way off, but recently recalibrated his thinking on its urgency.辛顿还警告，如果技术被赋予过多的自主权利，长期来看AI系统可能威胁人类。他曾经一直认为这种风险还很遥远，但最近重新调整了对这种紧迫性的看法。“It’s quite conceivable that humanity is a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence,” he said. Hinton’s decision to quit Google after a decade was spurred on by an academic colleague who convinced him to speak out about this, he added.他说：“极有可能人类是智能演化的一个短暂阶段。”辛顿受到学术界同事的鼓励，辞去了在谷歌十年的职务，从而能够更加自由地表达这种观点。Born in London, Hinton comes from an illustrious lineage of scientists. He is the great-great-grandson of the British mathematicians Mary and George Boole, the latter of whom invented Boolean logic, the theory that underlies modern computing.辛顿出生于伦敦，来自一个杰出的科学家家庭。他是英国数学家玛丽·布尔和乔治·布尔的曾孙，后者发明了布尔逻辑，奠定了现代计算机的基础。As a cognitive psychologist, Hinton’s work in AI has aimed to approximate human intelligence — not just to build AI technology but to illuminate the workings of our own brains.作为认知心理学家，辛顿在AI领域的工作是模拟人类智能。这不仅是为了构建AI技术，还为了阐明我们自己大脑的运作方式。Stuart Russell, an AI professor at University of California, Berkeley, an academic peer of Hinton’s, said his background meant he was “not the most mathematical of people you’ll find in the machine-learning community”. 加州大学伯克利分校AI教授斯图尔特·罗素是辛顿的学术同行，他说辛顿的背景意味着他“并不是机器学习领域里最具数学天赋的人之一”。He pointed to Hinton’s big breakthrough in 1986, when he published a paper about a technique called “backpropagation”, which showed how computer software could learn over time.他指出，辛顿在1986年取得了重大突破，发表了一篇关于“反向传播”技术的论文，揭示了计算机软件如何随时间不断学习的方法。“It was clearly a seminal paper,” Russell said. “But he didn’t derive the . . . rule the way a mathematician would. He used his intuition to figure out a method that would work.”罗素说：“这显然是一篇具有开创性的论文，但他并没有像数学家一样推导出规则，而是运用自己的直觉想出了一种可行的方法。”Hinton hasn’t always been publicly outspoken about his ethical views but in private he has made them plain.虽然辛顿一直不怎么公开发表他的道德观点，但私下里他表达得很明确。In 1987, when he was an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, he decided to leave his position and emigrate to Canada.1987年，他还是美国卡内基梅隆大学的副教授时，决定辞职移民加拿大。One of the reasons he gave, according to Bengio, was an ethical one — he was concerned about the use of technology, particularly AI, in war and much of his funding was coming from the US military.根据本吉奥的说法，他给出的原因之一是道德考量，他担心技术，特别是AI被用于战争，而他的大部分资金来源于美国军方。“He wanted to feel good about the funding he got and the work he was doing,” said Bengio. “He and I share values about society. That humans matter, that the dignity of all humans is essential. And everyone should benefit from the progress that science is creating.”本吉奥说：“他想对自己获得的资金和所做的工作安心。他和我一样重视社会价值观，认为人类至关重要，所有人都应该从科学进步中受益。”In 2012, Hinton and his two graduate students at the University of Toronto — including Ilya Sutskever, now a co-founder of OpenAI — made a major breakthrough in the field of computer vision. They built neural networks that could recognise objects in images orders of magnitude more accurately than had ever been possible before. Based on this work, they founded their first start-up, DNNresearch.2012年，辛顿在多伦多大学与他的两名研究生，其中包括OpenAI联合创始人伊尔亚·苏茨克维，在计算机视觉领域取得了重大突破。他们构建的神经网络能够前所未有地更加准确识别图像中的物体。基于这项工作，他们创办了他们的第一个创业公司DNNresearch。Their company — which didn’t make any products — was sold to Google for $44mn in 2013, after a competitive auction that led to China’s Baidu, Microsoft and DeepMind bidding to acquire the trio’s expertise.公司并未生产任何产品，但在2013年，它被谷歌以4400万美元的价格收购。此前，百度、微软和DeepMind都竞相收购他们团队的专业技术。Since then, Hinton has spent half his time at Google, and the other half as a professor at the University of Toronto.自那以后，辛顿一半时间在谷歌，另一半时间在多伦多大学担任教授。According to Russell, Hinton is constantly coming up with new ideas and trying new things out. “Every time he had a new idea, he’d say at the end of his talk: ‘And this is how the brain works!’”据罗素称，辛顿不断提出新想法并尝试新事物。“每次他有新想法，就会在讲话结束时说：’这就是大脑的工作方式！’”When asked on stage whether he regretted his life’s work, given it could contribute to the myriad harms he had outlined, Hinton said he had been mulling it over.当被问及他是否后悔从事这辈子的工作，因为它可能会导致他所概述的多种危害，辛顿说他一直在思考。“This stage of [AI] was not foreseeable. And until very recently I thought this existential crisis was a long way off,” he said. “So I don’t really have regrets about what I do.”“这个（AI）阶段是不可预见的。我原来一直认为这种存在危机还很遥远，直到这两天我才发现不是。这样说来，我对自己所做的事情并没有任何后悔。”
