From the December 2023 issue of Toronto Life
Rage Against
the Machine
Geoffrey Hinton spent half a century developing artificial intelligence. Now, he worries that his life’s work could spell the end of humanity. Inside his mission to warn the world
2023 was the year artificial intelligence finally caught up to the hype. Last November, American research lab OpenAI released the now-ubiquitous chatbot ChatGPT. It could summarize novels in seconds. It could write computer code. Its potential to generate scripts contributed to sending Hollywood’s writers on strike. Within two months, it had 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing app of all time, and Microsoft threw $10 billion at Open-AI to keep the party going. After decades of false starts, AI was finally off to the races. There was, however, one guy who wasn’t popping champagne: Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto computer science professor better known as the godfather of AI.