I think actually for fundamental original research, universities are better than the big companies.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Geoffrey Hinton
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
I’m just worried by the fact that there’s very few cases of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things.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
An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.BlogThe Specter Of NeuraleseSep 24, 2026
For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.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 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.BlogWhy I still haven't bought into true RSISep 19, 2026
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: Agent swarms, alignment, and recursive self-improvementSep 17, 2026
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.
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