In early tests and a company demo, GPT-4 was used to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch. In March, some prominent figures in tech signed a letter calling for artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” The letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit backed by Elon Musk,came just two weeks after OpenAI announced GPT-4, an even more powerful version of the technology that powers ChatGPT. OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are at the forefront of this trend, but IBM, Amazon, Baidu and Tencent are working on similar technologies.

The wave of attention around ChatGPT late last year helped renew an arms race among tech companies to develop and deploy similar AI tools in their products. Hinton’s decision to step back from the company and speak out on the technology comes as a growing number of lawmakers, advocacy groups and tech insiders have raised alarms about the potential for a new crop of AI-powered chatbots to spread misinformation and displace jobs. “We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.” “We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI,” Dean said in a statement provided to CNN. Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google, said Hinton “has made foundational breakthroughs in AI” and expressed appreciation for Hinton’s “decade of contributions at Google.” “I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google,” Hinton said in a tweet.

In a tweet Monday, Hinton said he left Google so he could speak freely about the risks of AI, rather than because of a desire to criticize Google specifically. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told the New York Times, which was first to report his decision. He worked part-time at Google for a decade on the tech giant’s AI development efforts, but he has since come to have concerns about the technology and his role in advancing it. Hinton’s pioneering work on neural networks shaped artificial intelligence systems powering many of today’s products. Geoffrey Hinton speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Canada, in 2019.

If he had been with me about