Geoffrey Hinton gave an interview to MIT Technology Review

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai/

Some quotes:

[On learning algorithm] “Our brains have 100 trillion connections,” says Hinton. “Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. So maybe it’s actually got a much better learning algorithm than us.”

[On few-shot learning] “People seemed to have some kind of magic,” says Hinton. “Well, the bottom falls out of that argument as soon as you take one of these large language models and train it to do something new. It can learn new tasks extremely quickly.” Compare a pretrained large language model with a human in the speed of learning a task like that and the human’s edge vanishes, he says.

[Regarding hallucinations/confabulations] Hinton has an answer for that too: bullshitting is a feature, not a bug. “People always confabulate,” he says. Half-truths and misremembered details are hallmarks of human conversation: “Confabulation is a signature of human memory. These models are doing something just like people.” “We don’t expect them to blather the way people do,” says Hinton. “When a computer does that, we think it made a mistake. But when a person does that, that’s just the way people work. The problem is most people have a hopelessly wrong view of how people work.”

[On future] “I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us. I think they’re very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future,” he says. “How do we survive that?”

[On next steps for AI] Hinton believes that the next step for smart machines is the ability to create their own subgoals, interim steps required to carry out a task. What happens, he asks, when that ability is applied to something inherently immoral?

[On AI goals] “Well, here’s a subgoal that almost always helps in biology: get more energy. So the first thing that could happen is these robots are going to say, ‘Let’s get more power. Let’s reroute all the electricity to my chips.’ Another great subgoal would be to make more copies of yourself. Does that sound good?”

[On regulation] He thinks the international ban on chemical weapons might be one model of how to go about curbing the development and use of dangerous AI. “It wasn’t foolproof, but on the whole people don’t use chemical weapons,” he says.

[On "Don't look up" movie] “I think it’s like that with AI,” he says, and with other big intractable problems as well. “The US can’t even agree to keep assault rifles out of the hands of teenage boys,” he says.