YouSaid · the spoken record

Geoffrey Hinton

lines on the record: 127
first: 2025-06-16
most recent: 2025-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So I'm worried about a Canadian bank being taken down by a cyber attack and the attacker selling shares that it holds. So I spread my money and my children's money between three banks. In the belief that if a cyber attack takes down one Canadian bank, the other Canadian banks will very quickly get very careful.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes it's one of the few places where I changed what I do radically because I'm scared of cyber attacks. Canadian banks are extremely safe. In two thousand eight no Canadian banks came anywhere near going bust. So they're very safe banks because they're well regulated, fairly well regulated. Nevertheless, I think a cyber attack might be able to bring down a bank. Now, if you have all my savings in shares in banks held by banks. So if the bank gets attacked and it holds your shares, they're still your shares. And so I think you'd be okay unless the attacker sells the shares because the bank can sell the shares. If the attacker sells your shares, I think you're screwed. I don't know. I mean, maybe the bank would have to try and reimburse you, but the bank's bust by now, right?”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And these already, obviously I is very patient, so they can go through a hundred million lines of code looking for known ways of attacking them. That's easy to do, but they're going to get more creative and they may some people believe, and some people who know a lot believe that maybe by 2030 they'll be creating new kinds of cyber attacks which no person ever thought of. So that's very worrisome.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For them, it's very annoying I have a smaller version of that, which is some people now publish papers with me as one of the authors. But it looks like it's in order that they can get lots of citations to themselves.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They send you something saying hi I'm your friend John and I'm stuck in El Salvador. Could you just wire this money? That's one kind of attack. But the fishing attacks are really trying to get your login credentials.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I've distinguished these two kinds of risk. Let's talk about all the risks from bad human actors using AI. Versus Cyber Attacks So between twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four they increased by about a factor of twelve, twelve hundred percent. And that's probably because these large language models make it much easier to do fishing attacks.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what we've got is sort of We've got capitalism, which has done very nicely by us. It's produced lots of goods and services for us. But these big companies, they're legally required to maximize profits. And that's not what you want from the people developing this stuff.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we need is, I mean, at this point in history, when we're about to produce things more intelligent than ourselves, what we really need is a kind of world government that works run by intelligent thoughtful people. And that's not what we got.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People say, well, why don't we just stop it now? We're not going to stop it because it's too good for too many things. Also, we're not going to stop it because it's good for battle robots. And none of the countries that sell weapons are going to want to stop it. Like the European regulations, they have some regulations about AI, and it's good they have some regulations, but they're not designed to deal with most of the threats. And in particular, the European regulations have a clause in them that say none of these regulations apply to military uses of AI. So governments are willing to regulate companies and people, but they're not willing to regulate themselves.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“still here, yes. So the atomic bomb was really only good for one thing, and it was very obvious how it worked, even if you hadn't had the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was obvious that it was a very big bomb that was very dangerous. With AI, it's good for many, many things. It's going to be magnificent in healthcare and education and more or less any industry that needs to use its data is going to be able to use it better with AI. So we're not going to stop the development.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I simply don't know, so if I had to bet, I'd say the probabilities in between, and I don't know where to estimate it in between. I often say 10 to 20% chance I'll wipe us out. But that's just gut based on the idea that we're still making them, and we're pretty ingenious, and the hope is that if enough smart people do enough research with enough resources, we'll figure out a way to build them so they'll never want to harm us.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's competent of that. I think both of those positions are extreme. It's very hard to estimate the probabilities in between.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I talk mainly about that second risk because lots of people say, is that a real risk? And yes, it is. Now we don't know how much of a risk it is. We've never been in that situation before. We've never had to deal with things smarter than us. So really the thing about that existential threat is that we have no idea how to deal with it. We have no idea what it's going to look like. And anybody who tells you they know just what's going to happen and how to deal with it, they're talking nonsense. So we don't know how to estimate the probability probabilities it'll replace us. Some people say it's like less than 1%. My friend Jan Lec, who was a postdoc with me, thinks, no, no, no, no, we're always going to be, we build these things, we're always going to be in control. We'll build them to be obedient. And other people like Yudkowsky say, no, no, no, these things are going to wipe us out for sure. If anybody builds it, it's going to wipe us all out.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, first of all, I want to make a distinction between two completely different kinds of risk. There's risks that come from people misusing AI. And that's most of the risks and all of the short term risks. And then there's wrists that come from AI getting super smart and suddenly it doesn't need us”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how we think it's working. Nobody really knows for sure how the brain works, and nobody knows how it gets the information about whether you should increase the strength of a connection or decrease the strength of a connection. That's the crucial thing. But what we do know now from AI is that if you could get information about whether to increase or decrease the connection strength so as to do better at whatever tasks you're trying to do, then we could learn incredible things because that's what we're doing now with artificial neuronets. It's just we don't know for real brains how they get that signal about whether to increase or decrease.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd like to tell you what I learned. So I produced some sentences. This is a rather simplistic model, but roughly right. Your brain is trying to figure out how can I change the strengths of connections between neurons so I might have put that word next. And so you'll do a lot of learning when a very surprising word comes, and not much learning when it's a very obvious word. If I say fish and ships, you don't do much learning when I say chips, but if I say fish and cucumber you do a lot more learning. You wonder why did I say cucumber? So that's roughly what's going on in your brain.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change for the general population when ChatGPT came out. It changed for me when I realized that the kinds of digital intelligences we're making have something that makes them far superior to the kind of biological intelligence we have. If I want to share information with you, so I go off and I learn something.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a very good question. How could you not have seen that? But remember neural networks twenty thirty years ago were very primitive in what they could do. They were nowhere near as good as humans at things like vision and language and speech recognition. The idea that you have to now worry about it getting smarter than people, that seems silly then.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not really I was quite slow to understand some of the risks. Some of the risks were always very obvious, like people would use AI to make autonomous lethal weapons. That is, things that go around deciding by themselves who to kill. Other risks, like the idea that they will one day get smarter than us and maybe would become irrelevant, I was slow to recognise that. Other people recognized it twenty years ago. I only recognized it a few years ago that that was a real risk that was might becoming quite soon.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't just me believed it early on von Neumann believed it, and Turing believed it, and if either those had lived, I think AI would have had a very different history, but they both died young.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There weren't many good universities that had groups that did that, so if you did that, the best young students who believed in that came and worked with you. So I was very fortunate in getting a whole lot of really good students.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One idea was that sort of core of human intelligence was reasoning and to do reasoning you needed to use some form of logic. And so AI had to be based around logic. And in your head, you must have something like symbolic expressions that you manipulated with rules. And that's how intelligence worked. And things like learning or reasoning by analogy, they'd all come later once we've figured out how basic reasoning works. There was a different approach, which is to say, let's model AI on the brain, because obviously the brain makes us intelligent, so simulate a network of brain cells on a computer and try and figure out how you would learn strengths of connections between brain cells so that it learn to do complicated things, like recognize objects in images or recognize speech, or even do reasoning. I push that approach for like 50 years.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There weren't that many people who believed that we could make neural networks work, artificial neural networks. So for a long time in AI, from the 1950s onwards, there were kind of two ideas about how to do AI.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was probably the most important person behind the development of the early versions of ChatGPT. And I think he left because he had safety concerns. We should recognize that this stuff is an existential threat. And we have to face the possibility that unless we do something soon when near the end.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have simply, they're not designed to deal with most of the threats. Like the European regulations have a clause that say, none of these apply to military uses of AI. Yeah, it's crazy”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How dangerous I could be. Realized that these things will one day get smarter than us, and we've never had to deal with that. And if you want to know what life's like when you're not the apex intelligence, ask a chicken. So there's risks that come from people misusing AI. And then there's risks from AI getting super smart and signing it doesn't need us”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because there weren't many people who believed that we could model AI on the brain so that it learned to do complicated things, like recognize objects and images or even do reasoning. And I pushed that approach for 50 years. And then Google acquired that technology. And I worked there for 10 years, something that's now used all the time in AI.”
2025-06-16 · The Diary of a CEO · Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT