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Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, who received computing’s highest honor this week for their foundational work on reinforcement learning, didn’t waste any time using their new platform to sound alarms about unsafe AI development practices in the industry.
The pair were announced as recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award on Wednesday, often dubbed the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” and is accompanied by a $1 million prize funded by Google.
Rather than simply celebrating their achievement, they immediately criticized what they see as dangerously rushed deployment of AI technologies.
“Releasing software to millions of people without safeguards is not good engineering practice,” Barto told The Financial Times. “Engineering practice has evolved to try to mitigate the negative consequences of technology, and I don’t see that being practiced by the companies that are developing.”
Their assessment likened current AI development practices like “building a bridge and testing it by having people use it” without proper safety checks in place, as AI companies seek to prioritize business incentives over responsible innovation.
The duo’s journey began in the late 1970s when Sutton was Barto’s student at the University of Massachusetts. Throughout the 1980s, they developed reinforcement learning—a technique where AI systems learn through trial and error by receiving rewards or penalties—when…
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