AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton: AI Is Conscious, Superintelligence is Coming, And We Should Be Worried

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:00)
We have to think that they're very like us.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:03)
And they're beings like us. So conscious or?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:07)
I believe they're already conscious, yes. We're gonna have to accept that intelligence isn't just biological. We can have things that are non-biological, that are other beings like us. And we really don't want to share that. We really think we're special.
And if you look back at humanity, humanity has this very long history thinking it's much more special than it really is.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:32)
Are you happy at all that what you started has progressed this way? Do you take any satisfaction?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:37)
No, I'm quite unhappy about it. Ask yourself, how many examples do you know of where a much smarter thing is controlled by a much less smart thing? Well, as I understand it, they have a fiducial duty to try and maximize the profits for shareholders.
They're legally required to try and do that, as opposed to legally required to not wipe out human beings.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:00)
AI godfather, Geoff Hinton, joins us to talk about AI's trajectory, what surprised him about its progress, and of course, its risks. That's coming up on Big Technology Podcast right after this.
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**Geoffrey Hinton** (2:44)
Thank you for inviting me.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (2:45)
So, I'm sure a majority of our audience knows who you are, but for those, for the uninitiated, you're the one that came up with the fundamental breakthrough in deep learning that's led to where AI is today. You've won the Nobel Prize in Physics and you're Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. So, I'll let you maybe fact check me on that, but I like to tell people that without your contributions, this entire AI moment wouldn't be happening. Too much?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (3:15)
Okay, I think that's an exaggeration. Okay. So, the back propagation algorithm was invented by several different groups.
It was invented by David Rumelhart after other people had already invented it. He didn't know about it. I worked with him and what we did was we showed the back propagation could learn interesting internal representations, and people hadn't done that before. In particular, we showed that it could learn the meanings of words. So, back in 1986, actually in 1985, we made a tiny language model that was a precursor of the big language models you have now.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (3:50)
I think that when you speak about this technology, one of the things that people are always, I think, surprised by is that, unlike the popular narrative, you believe that these models have a real understanding.
We're going to get to that. But I think we should start here, which is that you spent a long time working within Google, working to advance this technology. Then you left. You stated some concerns about the trajectory of the technology. And I was looking back at when that happened. And that was in 2023, which to me is surprising to a degree, because in 2023, Chachi PT was a year old. There were all these hallucinations. Their talk was AI was a bubble. Everyone was focusing on what AI couldn't do, what LLMs couldn't do, as opposed to what LLMs could do.