The godfather of AI repeats his grim prediction: “They’re going to be much smarter than us”
Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” has made yet another horrifying prediction about his creation.
Geoffrey Hinton is known as the “godfather of AI,” and for good reason. A Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist and a former Google executive, Hinton has previously warned of the dangers of the technology that is advancing quicker than anyone realises.
The 77-year-old is recognised for his groundbreaking contributions to neural networks, which laid the foundation for today’s AI boom. However, he left his Google position in 2023 and has since been a key voice in speaking out against the dangers of the technology.
“There’s risks that come from people misusing AI,” Hilton said, “and that’s most of the risks and all of the short-term risks. And then there’s risks that come from AI getting super smart and understanding it doesn’t need us,” Hinton said in June of this year. “I think both of those positions are extreme.”
“AI is going to be much smarter than us... it will try to stay alive”
“I often say [there’s a] 10% to 20% chance [for AI] to wipe us out. But that’s just gut, based on the idea that we’re still making them and we’re pretty ingenious. And the hope is that if enough smart people do enough research with enough resources, we’ll figure out a way to build them so they’ll never want to harm us.”
Now, he was warned once again of the dangers of the technology, and his prediction is perhaps even more grim. Speaking at Ai4, an industry conference in Las Vegas, in August, Hilton revealed that AI are “going to be much smarter than us. They’re going to have all sorts of ways to get around that.”
He added that the systems “will very quickly develop two subgoals, if they’re smart: One is to stay alive… (and) the other subgoal is to get more control. There is good reason to believe that any kind of agentic AI will try to stay alive.”
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Hinton also spoke about the timeline towards humans achieving Artificial General Intelligence, — intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities. Previously he had thought that it could take 30 years to 50 years to achieve AGI, but given current progress, he now sees this time arriving much sooner: “A reasonable bet is sometime between five and 20 years,” he said, adding that a potential benefit will undoubtedly come in medicine: “We’re going to see radical new drugs. We are going to get much better cancer treatment than the present.”
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