Open Questions | Geoffrey Hinton on preventing an AI takeover and the ‘very worrying’ China-US tech race
The ‘godfather of AI’ discusses the risks of the technology and whether superpowers can find common ground to rein it in
Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist often called the “godfather of AI” because of his revolutionary neural network models inspired by the structure of the human brain. His research brought about a paradigm shift that enabled today’s machine learning technology. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John J. Hopfield of Princeton University.
Hinton holds the title of university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
A company he co-founded with two graduate students was acquired by Google in 2013. He joined Google Brain, the company’s AI research team, the same year and was eventually named a vice-president. Hinton left Google in 2023 because he wanted to speak freely about the risks of AI.
In June, he travelled to China and spoke at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
Was the trip to Shanghai your first visit to China? What are your takeaways from the trip?
It was my first trip to China. I’ve had a very bad back, so it’s been very hard to travel for a long time, but now it’s improved. That’s why I didn’t come to China sooner.