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Calling Toronto “one of the world’s leading AI research hubs,” CBS News recently spoke to several of the field’s luminaries – all connected to the University of Toronto – about the potential impact of AI-powered chatbot technologies such as ChatGPT.

Geoffrey Hinton, a University Professor Emeritus in the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science,  about the past, present and future of AI, saying the technology is “comparable in scale to the industrial revolution or electricity or maybe the wheel.”

Hinton, who is also affiliated with Google, has mentored many students including U of T alumni Nick Frosst, co-founder of AI language processing company Cohere, and Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT.

“In the context of large language models, we get a huge amount of text and then we show it a few words and we get it to predict the next word,” Frosst told CBS. “This simple technique turns out to give you something very useful and very powerful.”

Recognized for , U of T is also home to the – created to help guide the development and implementation of AI and other transformational technologies by taking into account social, ethical and other considerations. 

Just how these powerful technologies are managed is an issue people should be thinking about now, Hinton said, pointing out that the development of artificial general intelligence, a machine that could exhibit human levels of intelligence, is progressing faster than we think.

“Until quite recently I used to think it might be 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI,” he said. “Now I think it might be 20 years or less.”