Geoffrey Hinton thinks that AI is a bigger threat than climate change.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI,” quit Google earlier this week so he could talk freely about artificial intelligence. He said that AI is a bigger threat to humanity than climate change.

Hinton left Google after ten years of hard work for the tech giant.

People think of him as a pioneer in developing AI neural networks, which are now used in a wide range of technological goods.

In 1986, he worked with others to write a paper called “Learning representations by back-propagating errors.” This paper was an important step in the development of neural networks, which are the basis of AI technology.

In 2018, he was given the Turing Award for his study achievements.

But right now, he is talking about how AI could be dangerous and what would happen if machines took over people.

During an interview with Reuters, Hinton said, “I don’t want to make climate change less important. I wouldn’t want to say, “Don’t worry about climate change,” because I think that’s wrong. That is also a big risk. But I think this could be more important.”

“It’s easy to tell someone what they should do about climate change: they should just stop burning carbon. If you do that, things will work out in the end. “It’s not clear at all what you should do in this case,” the AI pioneer said.

The AI weapons race began when OpenAI, which was backed by Microsoft, released ChatGPT, a chatbot that looked and acted like a person. This caught the attention of people and tech companies all over the world. In just two months, 100 million people used it every month.

As the ChatGPT 4 came out on the market in March, the CEOs of SpaceX and Twitter, along with other tech CEOs and leaders, wrote an open letter asking for a six-month break. They said that the ChatGPT 4 posed grave risks to humanity.

Even though Hinton didn’t sign the letter, he agreed that AI could be a threat to humanity’s very existence and didn’t agree that study should be stopped.

“It’s completely impossible,” he said.

“I’m in the group that thinks this is an existential risk, and it’s close enough that we should be working very hard and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it right now,” said Hinton.

In response to the open letter, lawmakers from the European Union asked US President Joe Biden to invite European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to a global meeting to talk about the future of AI.

Last week, the committee decided on a set of proposals that would have a big impact on generative AI. These proposals would require companies like OpenAI to reveal any copy-protected materials that were used to train their models.

Biden met with the CEOs of several AI companies, including Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, at the White House. He said they would have a “frank and constructive discussion” about how companies need to be more open about their systems.

“The people in charge of technology know the most about it, and politicians need to be involved. We all have to think about it because it affects us all,” said Hinton.