It’s no understatement to say that Geoffrey Hinton is as close to a god as we’re ever going to have in the Artificial Intelligence space.

The British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist literally wrote the book on machine learning, after all. Along with AI rock stars Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun he picked up the 2018 Turing Award, the Nobel Prize for computer science, for creating the very building blocks of today's large language models (LLM).

Hinton is widely credited with creating the foundations of deep learning, which defines how LLMs are trained and how they synthesize and connect the data. So, his decision to quit his very plush job with Google so he could ring the alarm bells about AI means we should all stand up and take notice.

We can’t afford to ignore him. 

Over 1,100 of some of the most influential names in the artificial intelligence space last week signed a letter asking for a 6-month pause in training next-generation AI systems.

They warn the technology poses “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Should humanity listen to them and slam on the brakes? The answer to this question, as is almost always the case with anything related to AI, is complicated. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been justifiably generating headlines – and controversy – since it was first released to the public in November 2022.

The ink is barely dry on this first chapter of the artificial intelligence revolution, and already a second chapter is well underway.

Hold onto your hats, because for better or worse, AI is now coming for your productivity apps. 

Do artificial intelligence-driven chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT represent a mortal threat to the very future of knowledge workers?

Or do these virally popular examples of generative AI simply represent another specimen of disruptive technology that opens up new opportunities to move humans further up the value chain?

The answer, as with most things in tech, is more complex than it might initially seem. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one can afford to ignore the debate. This is no time to opt out of AI: it’s coming for us whether we like it or not. And while its impact on businesses, careers, and society at-large promises to be fundamental, it just as likely to not be as apocalyptic as the naysayers fear.