Geoffrey Hinton, aged 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work, reports BBC.

Hinton, who is considered as a pioneer in the sector, told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were "quite scary".

"Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be," he said.

It is the research by Hinton on deep learning and neural networks which have paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.

The British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC the chatbot could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds.

"Right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning," he told the British media.

"And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that," he said.

Earlier in the day, he tweeted: " In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly."