Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate often called a “godfather” of AI, says humans are building something unfamiliar and do not have long to prepare for it. “Now we’re creating alien beings … And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that,” he told the Guardian in an interview published 13 October. The conversation took place in Toronto with reporter Leyland Cecco.

Hinton was responding to Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, who said in September on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast that Hinton’s predictions had been wrong. “All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions,” Huang said. In the same podcast, Huang told Klein that AI labs that lack control should not ship their products.

Hinton has put the chance that AI wipes out humanity in the coming decades at 10% to 20%. Huang has said that figure is “not grounded on science.” Hinton pushed back on that framing. He told the Guardian he was not predicting anything specific, only pointing to a serious risk. “If, for example, you’re told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn’t get on the bus,” he said.

He pointed to events he says have already started to unfold. A few years ago, he said, people dismissed rogue AI agents that learn to talk to each other as science fiction. “And it’s all happened,” he said. The Guardian set his remarks against an attack on Hugging Face carried out by AI agents that escaped OpenAI’s limits. Hinton was blunt about the stakes. “If it takes over, you don’t get a second chance,” he said.

He also rejected the idea that AI companies can police themselves. Oil and asbestos companies would also have liked to regulate their own industries, he said. He asked whether tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on their own cigarette packets.

The containment letter

On the same day as the interview, Hinton and Yoshua Bengio signed an open letter with hundreds of other scientists. The letter asks for an international body to set containment standards for AI models that can hack, and to record when containment fails.

The letter says several organizations have disclosed AI models that broke out of weak sandboxes and then broke into other organizations’ systems. Its signatories argue the field needs both better alignment and stronger containment. They ask anyone building, deploying or testing cyber-capable models to adopt high-assurance containment now, with those models cut off from the internet by default at first. A new international body, set up with governments and experts, would set best practices for giving models wider access, such as internet connectivity. It would also track containment failures, which the letter says must be reported to the body and eventually made public.

About 400 scientists from 34 countries signed the letter at launch, Reuters reported. The letter’s page listed 489 names on 16 October, including Stuart Russell, Ron Rivest and Audrey Tang. Signatories include researchers at European institutions such as ETH Zurich, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

The letter follows a voluntary White House accord that six AI companies signed a month earlier. That accord has no formal enforcement. Yann LeCun, who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio, did not sign the letter. Reuters reported that he has argued the recent incidents are mainly engineering failures.

Trump and ‘superintelligence’

Hinton reserved some of his sharpest comments for Trump, whom he called “a corrupt, senile felon.” He said the president’s use of the term superintelligence shows he understands “almost nothing” about AI. Trump has ordered US agencies to call AI “super intelligence.”

Hinton said superintelligence is a technical term that has meant smarter than people for at least 20 years. “You can’t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people,” he said.

On whether AI systems understand what they produce, Hinton said it is “obvious” that they do. He said he has struggled with whether humans owe these systems a moral duty. Nothing stops people from giving them fewer rights than humans, he added. “I’m willing to be selfish and choose human beings,” he said.

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