Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
They call you the godfather of AI. So what would you be saying to people about their career prospects in a world of super intelligence?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:07)
Trained to be a plumber.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:08)
Really?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:09)
Yeah.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:10)
Okay, I'm going to become a plumber.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:12)
Geoffrey Hinton is the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer whose groundbreaking work has shaped AI and the future of humanity.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:19)
Why do they call you the godfather of AI?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:21)
Because there weren't many people who believed that we could model AI on the brain so that it learned to do complicated things, like recognize objects and images or even do reasoning. And I pushed that approach for 50 years. And then Google acquired that technology. And I worked there for 10 years on something that's now used all the time in AI.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:36)
And then you left?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:37)
Yeah.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:37)
Why?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:38)
So that I could talk freely at a conference.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:40)
What did you want to talk about freely?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:42)
How dangerous AI could be. I realized that these things will one day get smarter than us, and we've never had to deal with that. And if you want to know what life's like when you're not the apex intelligence, ask a chicken. So there's risks that come from people misusing AI, and then there's risks from AI getting super smart and saying it doesn't need us.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:01)
Is that a real risk?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (1:02)
Yes, it is. But they're not going to stop it because it's too good for too many things.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:05)
What about regulations?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (1:06)
They have some, but they're not designed to deal with most of the threats. Like, the European regulations have a clause that says none of these apply to military uses of AI.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:14)
Really?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (1:14)
Yeah, it's crazy.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:16)
One of your students left OpenAI.

**Geoffrey Hinton** (1:18)
Yeah, he was probably the most important person behind the development of the early versions, Chuck GPT, and I think he left because he had safety concerns. We should recognize that this stuff is an existential threat and we have to face the possibility that unless we do something soon, we're near the end.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:34)
So let's do the risks in what we end up doing in such a world. Geoffrey Hinton, they call you the godfather of AI.

**Geoffrey Hinton** (1:48)
Yes, they do.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:49)
Why do they call you that?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (1:51)
There weren't that many people who believed that we could make neural networks work, artificial neural networks. So for a long time in AI, from the 1950s onwards, there were kind of two ideas about how to do AI. One idea was that sort of core of human intelligence was reasoning, and to do reasoning, you needed to use some form of logic. And so AI had to be based around logic. And in your head, you must have something like symbolic expressions that you manipulated with rules, and that's how intelligence worked. And things like learning or reasoning by analogy, they'd all come later once we've figured out how basic reasoning works. There was a different approach, which is to say, let's model AI on the brain, because obviously the brain makes us intelligent. So simulate a network of brain cells on a computer, and try and figure out how you would learn strengths of connections between brain cells so that it learned to do complicated things, like recognize objects and images, or recognize speech, or even do reasoning. I pushed that approach for like 50 years. Because so few people believed in it, there weren't many good universities that had groups that did that. So, if you did that, the best young students who believed in that came and worked with you. So I was very fortunate in getting a whole lot of really good students.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:15)
Some of which have gone on to create and play an instrumental role in creating platforms like OpenAI.

**Geoffrey Hinton** (3:21)
Yes, so Ilya Suskova will be a nice example, a whole bunch of them.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:26)
Why did you believe that modeling it off the brain was a more effective approach?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (3:31)
It wasn't just me believed it. Early on, von Neumann believed it and Turing believed it. And if either of those had lived, I think AI would have had a very different history. But they both died young.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:43)
You think AI would have been here sooner?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (3:45)