Geoffrey Hinton

One of the founders of deep learning, the approach behind today’s AI. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. He left Google in May 2023 so he could speak freely about the risks, and is now one of the most prominent voices warning about them. Many serious people say AGI is dangerous quotes his warnings.

2023: Timelines collapse

• 2023-03-25, CBS: “Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI. And now I think it may be 20 years or less.”
• 2023-05-01, New York Times, the day he left Google: “I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
• 2023-05, X: “I now predict 5 to 20 years but without much confidence.”

2024: Odds of catastrophe

In December 2024, on BBC Radio 4, he put the chance of AI leading to human extinction within three decades at 10% to 20%.

See AGI timelines.