WASHINGTON (AP) — Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the 99-year-old retired statesman Henry Kissinger.

But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention. A pioneering researcher and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

Over his decades-long career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology we see today.

There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months. San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”

Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” that may use AI in ways that could have detrimental impacts on society — such as manipulating elections or instigating violence.

Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.

“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”

Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI. He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”

Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.

Hinton declined further comment Tuesday but said he would talk more about it at a conference Wednesday.

At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause real-world harms.

“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.

“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said in an interview last month.

A number of AI researchers have long expressed concerns about racial, gender and other forms of bias in AI systems, including text-based large language models that are trained on huge troves of human writing and can amplify discrimination that exists in society.

“We need to take a step back and really think about whose needs are being put front and center in the discussion about risks,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute. “The harms that are being enacted by AI systems today are really not evenly distributed. It’s very much exacerbating existing patterns of inequality.”

Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling for tech companies to agree to a 6-month pause on developing powerful AI systems, while LeCun, a top AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — First Republic Bank has become the second large regional bank with assets over $200 billion to fail in just a few weeks. Like Silicon Valley Bank, which was seized by the government on March 10, First Republic catered to a wealthy clientele, which helped it grow deposits rapidly but may have also contributed to its undoing. The bank’s business model left it susceptible to a sudden rise in interest rates.

Since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank — and Signature Bank the same weekend — investors have wondered who’s next. First Republic quickly rose to the top of that list, but investors and analysts worried about banks such as Comerica and KeyCorp, which also had large numbers of accounts with deposits above the federally-insured level of $250,000.

Here are some things to know about the collapse of First Republic Bank.

WHY DID FIRST REPUBLIC FAIL?

First Republic grew rapidly through deposits from wealthy individuals and companies. It used those deposits to make large loans, including jumbo mortgages, when interest rates were at historically low levels in hopes of then convincing customers to expand into more profitable products like wealth management.

Many of the bank’s accounts had deposits well north of the federally-insured $250,000. Once Silicon Valley Bank went under, clients pulled their money, fearful their deposits were in danger. First Republic said last week that depositors had withdrawn more than $100 billion, most of it during a few days in mid-March.

“Too many (First Republic) customers showed their true loyalties were to their own fears,” wrote Timothy Coffey, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott, in a note to investors.

What’s more, the large loans on First Republic’s books dropped in value as the Federal Reserve rapidly raised interest rates last year. So, if the bank tried to sell the loans to raise capital, it would do so at a loss. Similar circumstances had doomed Silicon Valley Bank.

First Republic planned to sell off unprofitable assets, including low interest mortgages that it provided to wealthy clients. It also announced plans to lay off up to a quarter of its workforce, which totaled about 7,200 employees in late 2022. But those plans were seen as too little, too late, by analysts.

By the middle of last week, it became clear government intervention in First Republic was necessary. Treasury officials asked banks to submit bids for First Republic, and bankers and regulators worked through the weekend to find a way forward.

WHAT BANK OR BANKS ARE NEXT?

For now, analysts expect the banking system will be spared any more large bank failures, saying the problems at Silicon Valley, Signature Bank and First Republic were unique to those companies.

Other midsize banks suffered large withdrawals of deposits and were forced to borrow from federal programs to shore up their balance sheets, but none were hit as hard as First Republic.

For example, Comerica, based in Dallas, said deposits fell by $3.7 billion after March 9 and the company borrowed $13 billion from federal programs “to provide a buffer in excess of normal operating levels.” Still the company earned $324 million in the first quarter, down slightly from the fourth quarter, but up from $189 million in the year-ago quarter.

Comerica shares dropped 37% in the week after Silicon Valley Bank failed, but have remained steady since. On Monday, the shares slipped almost 2%.

Shares of most midsize banks fell Monday, but the drops were moderate compared to the steep double-digits losses for many of them on March 13.

The trading “suggests little or no spillovers — consistent with the notion that there is no surprise” with the seizure of First Republic, said Krishna Guha at Evercore ISI.

WHAT HAPPENS TO FIRST REPUBLIC STOCKHOLDERS?

First Republic’s stock traded at $115 on March 8, then plummeted in the following days and weeks and closed Friday at $3.15. About $20 billion in market value has been wiped out. Trading in the stock was halted before U.S. markets opened Monday.

JPMorgan Chase, which has agreed to buy the deposits and most of the assets of First Republic, stressed that it is not assuming any of First Republic’s corporate debt or preferred stocks.

After a bank’s failure, bondholders are among the last to get paid — stockholders are at the very end of the line. The FDIC does not give estimates on how likely any creditor is to get repaid.

But the agency did say that its deposit insurance fund, which banks pay into, could take a $13 billion estimated loss as a result of First Republic’s failure.

While conditions could change over time, that likely leaves nothing left over for investors to recoup. Stockholders at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature were wiped out.

The outcome was just fine with one interested observer.

“While depositors are being protected, shareholders are losing their investments,” said President Joe Biden during a Rose Garden event focused on small businesses, when asked about the bank seizure. “Critically, taxpayers are not the ones who are on the hook.”