cambridge computer scientists who helped build the foundations of todays artificial intelligence technology are warning of its dangers but that doesnt mean they agree on what those dangers are or how to prevent themafter retiring from google so he could speak more freely socalled godfather of ai geoffrey hinton plans to outline his concerns wednesday at a conference at the massachusetts institute of technology hes already voiced regrets about his work and doubt about humanitys survival if machines get smarter than peoplefellow ai pioneer yoshua bengio cowinner with hinton of the top computer science prize told the associated press on wednesday that hes pretty much aligned with hintons concerns brought on by chatbots such as chatgpt and related technology but worries that to simply say were doomed is not going to helpthe main difference i would say is hes kind of a pessimistic person and im more on the optimistic side said bengio a professor at the university of montreal i do think that the dangers the shortterm ones the longterm ones are very serious and need to be taken seriously by not just a few researchers but governments and the populationthere are plenty of signs that governments are listening the white house has called in the ceos of google microsoft and chatgptmaker openai to meet thursday with vice president kamala harris in whats being described by officials as a frank discussion on how to mitigate both the nearterm and longterm risks of their technology european lawmakers are also accelerating negotiations to pass sweeping new ai rulesbut all the talk of the most dire future dangers has some worried that hype around superhuman machines which dont yet exist is distracting from attempts to set practical safeguards on current ai products that are largely unregulatedmargaret mitchell a former leader on googles ai ethics team said shes upset that hinton didnt speak out during his decade in a position of power at google especially after the 2020 ouster of prominent black scientist timnit gebru who had studied the harms of large language models before they were widely commercialized into products such as chatgpt and googles bardits a privilege that he gets to jump from the realities of the propagation of discrimination now the propagation of hate language the toxicity and nonconsensual pornography of women all of these issues that are actively harming people who are marginalized in tech said mitchell who was also forced out of google in the aftermath of gebrus departure hes skipping over all of those things to worry about something farther offbengio hinton and a third researcher yann lecun who works at facebook parent meta were all awarded the turing prize in 2019 for their breakthroughs in the field of artificial neural networks instrumental to the development of todays ai applications such as chatgptbengio the only one of the three who didnt take a job with a tech giant has voiced concerns for years about nearterm ai risks including job market destabilization automated weaponry