I’m just worried by the fact that there’s very few cases of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Geoffrey Hinton
PodcastNobel Prize Conversations podcastMay 15, 2025
I think actually for fundamental original research, universities are better than the big companies.PodcastNobel Prize Conversations podcastMay 15, 2025
I think it may take up to 20 years, I’d say probably within the next 20 years they get smarter than us.PodcastNobel Prize Conversations podcastMay 15, 2025
My belief is that government’s the only people who are powerful enough to deal with these large companies and even they may not be.TalkNobel Prize banquet speechDec 10, 2024
But we now have evidence that if they are created by companies motivated by short-term profits, our safety will not be the top priority. We urgently need research on how to prevent these new beings from wanting to take control. They are no longer science fiction.TalkNobel Prize banquet speechDec 10, 2024
In the near future AI may be used to create terrible new viruses and horrendous lethal weapons that decide by themselves who to kill or maim.TalkNobel Prize banquet speechDec 10, 2024
This new form of AI excels at modeling human intuition rather than human reasoning...TalkNobel Prize banquet speechDec 10, 2024
There is also a longer term existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves. We have no idea whether we can stay in control.InterviewNobel Prize interview, Nobel Week 2024Dec 6, 2024
In particular with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over, I think we’re a kind of bifurcation point in history where in the next few years we need to figure out if there’s a way to deal with that threat.
On the same topics
BlogThe Specter Of NeuraleseSep 24, 2026
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.BlogMysteries Of AI GeneralizationSep 23, 2026
This story of misalignment says that LLM alignment makes AIs more aligned, RLVR makes them less aligned, and the exact level of alignment depends on how these two things interact or cancel out. But if this work generalizes, all the bad effects from RLVR get sequestered to RLVR like problems.BlogMysteries Of AI GeneralizationSep 23, 2026
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.TalkSpeech at the UN Security CouncilSep 23, 2026
The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.
About this quote
Quotesby Glyph