Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” is warning of a Chernobyl-like AI event, saying humanity has roughly a decade to know whether AI can be safely developed and deployed.
Hinton’s work into AI and neural networks is widely credited with laying the groundwork for the modern AI industry and frontier models being developed. Despite is work, Hinton left his job at Google in mid-2023 to sound the alarm on the dangers the tech poses.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hinton struck a hopeful tone, while still emphasizing the inherent dangers involved in developing powerful AI models. Hinton told the outlet that within the next decade, humanity will finally know whether AI can be safely developed in a way that leads to “radical abundance,” or whether “we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart.”
A Lack of Faith in AI Execs
Perhaps more concerning is Hinton’s believe that some of the current executives leading the charge in AI development are more concerned with profits than safety.
“I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don’t give a shit. They’d rather have the money. That’s my belief,” Hinton said.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Hinton has been critical of AI execs, especially Altman. Ilya Sutskever, who led a failed boardroom coup against Altman, was one of Hinton’s former students. Hinton has expressed pride in Sutskever’s actions, which he attributed to a concern over safe AI development.
“I’d also like to acknowledge my students,” Hinton said in 2024, following his Nobel Prize win. “I was particularly fortunate to have many very clever students, much clever than me, who actually made things work. They’ve gone on to do great things.
“I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman, and I think I better leave it there and leave it for questions.”
Hinton then proceeded to discuss the issue more:
“So OpenAI was set up with a big emphasis on safety,” he added. “Its primary objective was to develop artificial general intelligence and ensure that it was safe.
“One of my former students Ilya Sutskever, was the chief scientist. And over time, it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that’s unfortunate.”
Chernobyl-Like Event
Given the recent spate of AI cyberattacks on various companies, Hinton told The Guardian that believes we could be looking at a Chernobyl-like event in the very near future.
“Either later this year or next year we’ll see Chernobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention,” he said.
“Can you imagine what would happen? We could recover from it [but] that would make them sit up and take notice.”
Coming from other people, Hinton’s commentary could be taken as doomsday talk and fear mongering. Given his status in the AI community, however, along with his unimpeachable credentials and insight, leaders who ignore his warning will do so at the peril of all humanity.
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