Godfather of AI: They Keep Silencing Me But I'm Trying to Warn Them ft. Geoffrey Hinton

5 practical takeaways from the Nobel Prize winner who helped build modern AI and now regrets it. Not doomerism: positioning.

With Geoffrey Hinton

"I used to think AI was thirty to fifty years away from matching human intelligence. I now think it's five to twenty. I was wrong before and I could be wrong again. But the direction of my updates is not comforting."

Geoffrey Hinton, on the episode

Geoffrey Hinton is the one they call the Godfather of AI. His 1980s work on neural networks and backpropagation is what the entire deep learning revolution sits on top of. He won a Nobel Prize for it in 2024. In 2023 he quit Google so he could say the quiet part out loud without representing a company with commercial interests in the answer. This episode isn't science fiction and it isn't panic. It's a calm set of specific warnings from one of the people who understands the mathematics better than almost anyone alive. The frame isn't 'AI will kill us all.' The frame is 'here are the specific decisions to make now, while you still have leverage.' Take it seriously on the merits.