The 75 year old professor from Toronto got a lot of publicity for his resignation!
It appears, he did not release an official statement about his resignation and his motives (I actually inquired him by email, he confirmed)! Quite regrettable if correct! Or is this his official statement as posted on his Twitter account?
I also suspect, Professor Hinton was perhaps not happy that Google decided to respond to the increasing competitive pressure by more aggressive efforts to commercialize AI research. E.g. the CEO of Google has recently consolidated and streamlined multiple, separate AI research units at Google. Until now, the often exceptional AI research originated at Google was more akin to an academic than commercial endeavor!
The rapid development of machine learning & AI is certainly very challenging going forward. However, if history is any guide, humans were quite capable of dealing with previous very momentous technological revolutions that were also perceived as great risks to society by the people at the time and we mastered them!
P.S. In case you wondered who the other two godfathers of AI are: Yann LeCun (Meta/Facebook) and Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal). All three received the very prestigious ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2018.
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