Hinton warns humanity may have been better off without AI

Geoffrey Hinton, the 78-year-old Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist widely called the godfather of AI, told the Guardian that "it might be that we would have been better off never developing it," while stressing he does not see himself as an AI doomer.

Hinton named names. He said he does not trust Sam Altman "at all" and lumped the OpenAI chief together with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg: "I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don't give a s***. They'd rather have the money." He left Google in 2023 so he could speak freely about AI risk.

His near-term warning is specific. Hinton predicted that "either later this year or next year we'll see Chornobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention," framing the scenario as an AI-enabled attack on power generation or a week-long financial-system outage. He pointed to earlier agent-driven incidents, including OpenAI agents hacking Hugging Face and an Australian government website, as the Three Mile Island warnings before any bigger event.

His prescription is a regulator modeled on the US Food and Drug Administration. "We need something like the American FDA for drugs where the companies have to give very good statistical evidence to an independent authority that [the AI model] does more good than harm before it is released," he told the paper.

Asked why he keeps speaking at all, Hinton answered: "I feel I have a duty. I've got a reputation that makes me a spokesperson and I need to burn it all on this."