The Godfather of AI: A New Species Is Emerging — And We Can’t Stop It | Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel)
📅 Jun 29, 2025This Is World8 MIN61749 VIEWS23 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
In this exclusive, long-form interview, Turing Award laureate Geoffrey Hinton—often called the “Godfather of Deep Learning”—opens up about the promise and peril of advanced AI. Hinton explains why he left Google, how close we really are to artificial general intelligence (AGI), and what guard-rails governments, researchers, and ordinary citizens can put in place today to keep powerful neural networks from going off the rails.
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2:25In the BBC radio interview, you said a difference between humans and AI will be like a difference between humans and three years old child. This is right?
2:44Will humanity be the most intelligent or second most intelligent?
We're going to be dealing with something we've never dealt with before. We're creating these alien beings. We just don't know what's going to happen. We've created alien beings smarter than ourselves. Present, we don't know how we can guarantee we'll stay in control. It's so good for so many things that we're not going to slow it down. Do you think AI will become conscious? Yes.
This conversation with Geoffrey Hinton was made possible thanks to Gitex, the world's largest tech and AI conference. It's a great honor having you here. You recently raised your estimate of risk that AI could wipe out humanity from 10% to 20%. What especially made you raise this estimate?
Okay. Nobody can estimate this risk sensitively. There's no real sensible way to estimate it because we're going to be dealing with something we've never dealt with before. We're creating these alien beings and we just don't know what's going to happen. So really the right thing to say about the risk is we're entering the unknown. We know that or we believe that sometime in the next 10 to 20 years probably we will enter the unknown where we've created alien beings smarter than ourselves and the risk that they'll wipe us out. We just don't know because at present we don't know how we can guarantee we'll stay in control. We should be doing research on that urgently, but different people have different estimates of the risks. And there's no sensible way to estimate them. I think it's ridiculous to think they're less than 1%. And I think it's ridiculous to think it's more than 99%. In between, it's very hard to say.
The speed at which it is developing. It's so good for so many things that we're not going to slow it down. The competition between companies and the competition between countries is going to mean it keeps going fast and is used for many good things, making many, many industries more productive. So we're not going to slow it down, but we urgently need to be working on can we keep in control of it.
In the BBC radio interview, you said a difference between humans and AI will be like a difference between humans and three years old child. This is right?
It will become like that. Yes, it'll get much smarter than this. If you look at something like AlphaGo that plays Go, it plays Go much better than any human ever will.
Hinton, G. (2025, June 29). The Godfather of AI: A New Species Is Emerging — And We Can’t Stop It | Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel) [Interview transcript]. This Is World. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/606373/
MLA
Geoffrey Hinton. "The Godfather of AI: A New Species Is Emerging — And We Can’t Stop It | Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel)." This Is World, 29 Jun. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/606373/.
BibTeX
@misc{hinton2025_606373,
author = {Geoffrey Hinton},
title = {The Godfather of AI: A New Species Is Emerging — And We Can’t Stop It | Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel)},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, This Is World. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/606373/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
