Nobel Prize 2024 winner proud of ex-student’s role in Sam Altman’s OpenAI ouster

Geoffrey Hinton, winner of 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, said that he is extremely proud of his former student Ilya Sutskever’s involvement in the dismissal of Sam Altman from OpenAI last year. Geoffrey Hinton said, “I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman”, referring to Ilya Sutskever, who completed his PhD in computer science under Hinton’s supervision at the University of Toronto in 2013.

Geoffrey Hinton talked about OpenAI’s initial mission and said, “OpenAI was set up with a big emphasis on safety. Its primary objective was to develop artificial general intelligence and ensure that it was safe.” But now Sam Altman’s priorities shifted, becoming more focused on profits rather than safety and “I think that’s unfortunate,” he said.

Ilya Sutskever was widely reported to be involved in Sam Altman’s ouster from OpenAI as the company’s board cited a lack of transparency in the CEO’s communications as the reason for his removal. Ilya Sutskever later expressed regret and called for Sam Altman’s reinstatement. He left OpenAI in May 2024 and soon after founded a new venture Safe Superintelligence Inc. that focuses on responsible AI development.

Geoffrey Hinton has warned about the risks of AI before as well. He left his post at Google’s AI research team last year so that he could talk freely about the risks associated with developing AI too quickly, he said. Asked about any regrets regarding his work, he said: “In the same circumstances, I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.”

Geoffrey Hinton, who was born in London, is affiliated with University of Toronto, Canada.

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