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Geoffrey Hinton quote, Dec 10, 2024

Nobel laureate in Physics 2024, University of Toronto · Dec 10, 2024 · Keynote, Nobel Prize banquet speech

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.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Geoffrey Hinton

Quote
I think actually for fundamental original research, universities are better than the big companies.May 15, 2025· Interview
I think it may take up to 20 years, I’d say probably within the next 20 years they get smarter than us.May 15, 2025· Interview
I’m just worried by the fact that there’s very few cases of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things.May 15, 2025· Interview
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.May 15, 2025· Interview
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.Dec 10, 2024· Keynote
This new form of AI excels at modeling human intuition rather than human reasoning...Dec 10, 2024· Speech
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.Dec 10, 2024· Speech
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.Dec 6, 2024· Interview

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The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
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.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
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.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
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.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
About this quote
Said by
Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate in Physics 2024, University of Toronto
Where
Nobel Prize banquet speech
Topics
Safety
Source
nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/speech/

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