AI Pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Win Touring Award, Warning against Risk Risk
Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have won the Turing Award for their success work on learning reinforcement with AI.
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Two forerunners of Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been awarded this year’s prestigious Turing Award, also known as the Nobel Prize for Computing by the Association for computing machinery. Both are recognized for their groundbreaking work on learning a machine learning technique, reinforcement, which enables the AI system to adapt to decision making through testing and error. The Turing Award is sponsored by Google and bear a $ 1 million award. On the other hand, Barto and Sutton are using this spotlight to raise concerns about rollouts in a hasty rollout of AI technologies without adequate safety measures.
Research of Barto and Sutton, which began in the late 1970s at Massachusetts Amharst University, performed ground work for many AI successes in recent years. Learning reinforcement was a part of those successes, and technology played an important role in defeating the human champion in the ancient board game Go in Google’s Alphago and an important method behind the popular AI system such as Openai’s chat.
Meanwhile, despite the transformational effects of their work, Barto and Sutton expressed growing rude about how the AI system is being released in a public domain. In an interview with financial TimesBarto stated that AI -hasty release of AI technologies is “like construction of a bridge and testing it using people”.
Barto said, “It is not a good engineering practice to release software to millions of people without security measures.” He said, “Engineering has developed to try to reduce the negative results of practice technology, and I do not see that the practice is being done by companies that are developing,” he said.
Their warnings shared by other major personalities in the AI world, including echo feelings, geoffree hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, have also played an alarm on the possible threats of uncontrolled AI development. In 2023, the CEO, including top AI researchers and CEO of OpenAII Sam Altman, issued a joint statement, warning that reducing the risk of AI-inspired extinction should be a global priority.
Openai AI is one of the leading players in the race and has faced criticism to prioritize commercial progress on safety concerns. In 2023, the Openai Board briefly excluded Altman, partly due to the apprehension that it was carrying the AI products to the market without fully understanding their implications. Even though Openai promised to improve its safety protocol, the company’s final transition to a beneficial model in December has expressed more concerns about its long -term commitment to moral AI development.