Geoffrey Hinton, whose work shaped modern artificial intelligence, says companies are moving too fast without enough focus on safety. Brook Silva-Braga introduced us to Hinton in 2023 and recently caught up with him.
Each weekday morning, "CBS Mornings" co-hosts Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil and Nate Burleson bring you the latest breaking news, smart conversation and in-depth feature reporting. "CBS Mornings" airs weekdays at 7 a.m. on CBS and stream it at 8 a.m. ET on the CBS News app.
Subscribe to "CBS Mornings" on YouTube: / cbsmornings
Watch CBS News 24/7: https://cbsnews.com/live/
Dow...
Last December, Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in machine learning, a major turning point on the road to artificial intelligence. Brook Silva-Braga introduced us to this leading figure in AI back in 2023 and recently went back to visit him.
Good morning, Brooke. Good morning. When we first met Hinton, the world had just been introduced to OpenAI's ChatGPT, triggering a kind of AI arms race. Hundreds of billions have been spent on AI in just the last two years. Hinton entered the field decades before it was cool. And now retired from Google, has a unique independent perspective on how he got here and where we're headed.
This is a Nobel Prize. Last year, Geoffrey Hinton, for most of his life an outcast professor, was awoken by a call in the middle of the night. He was getting the Nobel Prize.
People dream of winning these things. And when you do win it, does it feel like you thought it might? I never dreamt about winning one for physics. So, I don't know. I dreamt about winning one for figuring out how the brain works. Yeah. But I didn't figure out how the brain works, but I want one anyway.
That's because Hinton's attempt to model the brain instead helped change the world. In 1986, he proposed using a neural network to predict the next word in a sequence, the foundational concept that today's large language models have built upon.
You believe then that we would get here? Yes, but not this soon. Because that was 40 years. Yeah. I didn't think we'd get here in only 40 years. Yeah. But 10 years ago, I didn't believe we'd get here. Yeah. It happened fast. Yeah.
That speed, Hinton says, means education and medicine will soon be transformed. Climate change could be solved. But mostly, the rapid progress really worries him.
The best way to understand it emotionally is we're like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub. It's just such a cute tiger cub. Unless you can be very sure that it's not going to want to kill you when it's grown up, you should worry. I'm kind of glad I'm 77.
Hinton predicts AI will make authoritarians more oppressive and hackers more effective. He now spreads his money across three banks. The exact odds of an AI apocalypse are unknowable, he says, but hazards this guess.
a 10 to 20% risk AI will take over from humans. People haven't got it yet. People haven't understood what's coming. I don't think there's a way of stopping it taking control if it wants to. The issue is can we design it in such a way that it never wants to take control, that it's always benevolent.
Those concerns have long been shared by other AI leaders. Google CEO Sundar Pichai: "It can be very harmful if deployed wrongly." Ex-AI's Elon Musk, who continues to call for regulation: "It has the potential of civilizational destruction." Sam Altman, seen here before he became OpenAI's CEO: "I think AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world." But now, as these companies race each other and compete with China, Hinton worries they're foolishly, selfishly putting all of humanity at risk.
If you look what the big companies are doing right now, they're lobbying to get less AI regulation. There's hardly any regulation as it is, but they want less, because they want short-term profits.
Taking a stand against the establishment has been the hallmark of Hinton's life. When American AI funding required partnering with the Defense Department, he moved to Canada. When neural networks were laughed at as unworkable, he worked on them for a few decades more.
Is that a certain thing in a person? Yeah. You have to be contrarian. Yeah. You have to have a deep belief that everybody else could be doing things wrong and you could figure out how to do them right.
Hinton, G. (2025, April 26). AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says world is not prepared for what's coming [Interview transcript]. CBS Mornings. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/562533/
MLA
Geoffrey Hinton. "AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says world is not prepared for what's coming." CBS Mornings, 26 Apr. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/562533/.
BibTeX
@misc{hinton2025_562533,
author = {Geoffrey Hinton},
title = {AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says world is not prepared for what's coming},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CBS Mornings. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {apr},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/562533/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
