Enlarge / Geoffrey Hinton, chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute, speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)

According to the New York Times , AI pioneer Dr. Geoffrey Hinton has resigned from Google so he can "speak freely" about potential risks posed by AI. Hinton, who helped create some of the fundamental technology behind today's generative AI systems, fears that the tech industry's drive to develop AI products could result in dangerous consequences—from misinformation to job loss or even a threat to humanity.

"Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now," the Times quoted Hinton as saying. "Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary."

Hinton's resume in the field of artificial intelligence extends back to 1972, and his accomplishments have influenced current practices in generative AI. In 1987, Hinton, David Rumelhart, and Ronald J. Williams popularized backpropagation , a key technique for training neural networks that is used in today's generative AI models. In 2012, Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, and Ilya Sutskever created AlexNet , which is commonly hailed as a breakthrough in machine vision and deep learning, and it arguably kickstarted our current era of generative AI. In 2018, Hinton won the Turing Award , which some call the "Nobel Prize of Computing," along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.

Enlarge / Sometimes, building better Wordles means building the same Wordles... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—When The New York Times acquired daily puzzle mega-hit Wordle at the beginning of 2022, there were plenty of skeptics who were sure it signaled the end of the game's incredible viral rise . Apparently, those skeptics included some of the people at the Times itself.

At a presentation at the Game Developers Conference Thursday, Times game producer and industry veteran Zoe Bell said the new owners expected Wordle 's daily users "would just immediately decline" after the acquisition. Partly that was out of fear that some players would recoil from the "huge corporate behemoth" that now owned the indie hit. But it was also a simple recognition of the usual cycle for viral "zeitgeist" games: "How long can exponential growth go on?"

Just over a year after the acquisition, though, Bell said the company's efforts at "preserving Wordle as an Internet treasure" have paid off. That's thanks in large part to a patient, "first do no harm" strategy that didn't seek to directly monetize the game or introduce a lot of half-baked changes to the game's successful formula, she said.