Transcription
And joining me now is the man credited with laying the foundation for the AI revolution, the godfather of AI, Nobel Prizewinning computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton. Professor, thanks for joining us.
So your research on neural networks paved the way for this modern AI boom. I interviewed you two years ago, right after you quit Google and you first began warning the world about what you saw as the risks of AI. When you look at how AI has progressed um since then, are you more or less worried about it?
>> I'm probably more worried. It's progressed even faster than I thought. In particular, it's got better at doing things like reasoning and also at things like deceiving people.
>> What do you mean by deceiving people?
>> So, an AI um in order to achieve the goals you give it wants to stay in existence. And if it believes you're trying to get rid of it, it will um make plans to deceive you so you don't get rid of it.
>> Nvidia CEO Jensen Wang said recently about AI, quote, "Every industry needs it. Every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it. This is the single most impactful technology of our time." Do you agree with that assessment?
>> I agree that it's the single most impactful technology of our time. Yes.
Do you think the AI revolution could have a similar impact on society as the creation of the internet or or even the industrial revolution in the 18th century or even bigger than that?
Um I think it's at least like the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution made human strength more or less irrelevant. You couldn't get a job just because you were strong anymore. Um now it's made human in it's going to make human intelligence more or less irrelevant.
Now you and we in the media tend to focus on some of the downsides of AI. There are positives obviously otherwise you wouldn't have worked on it um early on. A lot of people are working to use this technology to benefit humanity as well to lead to advances in medicine and the like. But you think the risks from AI outweigh the positives?
I don't know. So there are a lot of wonderful effects of AI. It'll make health care much better. It'll make education much better. It'll enable us to design wonderful new drugs and wonderful new materials that may deal with climate change. Um, so there's a lot of good uses in more or less any industry where you want to predict something, it'll do a really good job. It'll do better than people were doing before. Even things like the weather. Um, but along with those wonderful things comes some scary things. And I don't think people are putting enough work into how we can mitigate those scary things.
You come from the tech world obviously. Do you think the Silicon Valley CEOs building these systems are taking the risks seriously at all? Um do you think that they are driven mainly by financial interests? A lot of people are going to get very wealthy off this.
>> I think it depends which company you're talking about. Initially, open AI was very concerned with the risks, but it's progressively moved away from that and put less emphasis on safety and more emphasis on profit. Um, Meta has always been very concerned with profit and less with safety. Anthropic was set up by people who left OpenAI and were very concerned with safety and they still are probably the company most concerned with safety, but of course, they're trying to make a profit, too.
What do you think the government should do if anything when it comes to regulation of AI, putting some sort of restrictions or some sort of oversight?
>> Um there's many things they should do. The very least they could do is insist that big companies that release chat bots do um significant testing to make sure those chat bots won't do bad things. like now for example encouraging children to commit suicide. Now that we know about that companies should be required to do significant testing to make sure that won't happen and um of course the tech lobby would rather have no regulations and it seems to have been have got to Trump on that and so Trump is trying to prevent there being any regulations which I think is crazy.
>> Can you you know these tech CEOs I don't. When one of them learns that an AI chatbot has talked a child into suicide, what is it that stops them? What is it that I mean, my impulse would be, well, holy smokes, stop AI right now until we fix this so not one other kid dies, but they don't do that. Can you explain to us what their thinking is, if anything?
>> Well, I don't really know their thinking. I suspect that um they think things like, well, there's a lot of money to be made here. We're not going to stop it just for a few lives. But I also think they may think there's a lot of good to be done here and just for a few lives, we're not going to um not do that good. For example, for driverless cars, they will kill people, but they'll kill far fewer people than ordinary drivers. So, it's worth it.
H tech um you you have said that you think there's a there's a 10 to 20% chance um that AI takes over the world. Uh people at home I hear that they might think it sounds like uh science fiction. It's alarmist but that's a very real fear of yours, right?
>> Yes, it's a very real fear of mine and a very real fear of many other people in the tech world. Elon Musk, for example, has similar beliefs.
>> You wrote that 2025 was a pivotal year for artificial intelligence, for AI. What do you think we're going to see in 2026?
>> Um, I think we're going to see AI get even better. It's already extremely good. We're going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It's already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it's going to be able to replace many other jobs. Um, each seven months or so, it gets to be able to do tasks that are about twice as long. So for a coding project for example, it used to be able to just do a minute's worth of coding. Now it can do whole projects that are like an hour long. In a few years time it'll be able to do software engineering projects that are months long. And then there'll be very few people needed for software engineering projects.
>> All right, Jeffrey Hinton, thank you so much. We really appreciate your time and we hope that people are listening to your warnings.