Geoffrey Hinton, popularly known as the “Godfather of AI,” has raised serious concerns about the unchecked pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development and some of the major tech companies not acknowledging its dangers. In a recent episode of the One Decision podcast, Hinton criticised corporate leaders for publicly minimising the risks associated with AI, despite being well aware of them behind closed doors. “Many of the people in big companies, I think, are downplaying the risk publicly. People like Demis, for example, really do understand the risks and really want to do something about it," Hinton said in the podcast. He further emphasised on how AI systems are evolving at an alarming rate, in ways that even researchers don't understand completely. “The rate at which they’ve started working now is way beyond what anybody expected,” he added. Hinton also expressed regret for not recognising the potential dangers of AI earlier in his career. “I should have realized much sooner what the eventual dangers were going to be. I always thought the future was far off and I wish I had thought about safety sooner,” he admitted. Hinton quit Google in 2023 after more than a decade with the company. While his exit was seen as a protest against the tech giant’s aggressive AI inclusion, he refuted the claims during the podcast. “There’s a wonderful story that the media loves, this honest scientist who wanted to tell the truth so I had to leave Google. It’s a myth,” he said. “I left Google because I was 75 and I couldn’t program effectively anymore, but when I left, maybe I could talk about all these risks more freely.” He acknowledged that staying at a company like Google would have naturally imposed limits on what he could say publicly. “You can’t take their money and then not be influenced by what’s in their own interest,” Hinton added. Hinton further hailed Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and current head of Google DeepMind, as one of the few leaders who understands the risks of advanced AI and is actively working to address them. Hassabis sold DeepMind to Google in 2014 and has long been vocal about the risks of AI. In an earlier interview with CNN, he expressed concern not about layoffs by big companies but about the potential for the technology to be weaponised. “A bad actor could repurpose those same technologies for a harmful end. And so one big thing is how do we restrict access to these systems, powerful systems, to bad actors but enable good actors to do many, many amazing things with it?” Hassabis told CNN.
