An interview with AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who recently left Google after over a decade to speak about AI's risks, on regrets, quitting the company, and more
For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.
New York TimesCade Metz
Context & Ripple Effects
Hinton’s departure turned a longtime internal AI researcher into a public critic at a moment when Google had already signaled it was handling chatbot deployment more cautiously than smaller startups. His warning therefore sharpened the tension between safety review and competitive pressure.
Related coverage frames the interview as an early marker in a wider debate over who gets heard inside major AI labs: criticism of Hinton’s earlier silence alongside Timnit Gebru’s criticism of Google’s language-model work made the messenger as consequential as the message. Later reporting on a post-ChatGPT race to catch up shows why those concerns faced mounting commercial pressure.
First-order effects
Hinton can speak publicly about perceived AI harms without Google employment constraints, putting reputational pressure on Google to explain how its product safeguards and research practices address those risks.
Google’s AI leadership must manage a visible dissenting voice from one of the field’s best-known pioneers while continuing to decide how cautiously to ship chatbot capabilities.
Second-order effects
The departure gives employees, researchers, policymakers, and the public a high-profile reference point for scrutinizing whether lab safety commitments match deployment incentives.
Competitive pressure becomes harder to separate from governance: Google’s earlier cautious approach to AI chatbots can be cast either as responsible restraint or as a constraint in a market moving quickly.
Third-order effects
If prominent researchers increasingly leave frontier labs to raise concerns, AI governance may shift from primarily internal review toward more public contestation over release decisions, accountability, and regulation.
The durable fault line is likely to be whether concentrated AI developers can preserve credible independent safety research while their products become central to competitive strategy; this interview alone cannot resolve that question.
The trend: This is an early signal of AI industrialization colliding with demands for independent safety oversight as frontier-model deployment accelerates.
In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.
When the godfather of neural metwork artificial intelligence quits his job at Google to start telling us we should be worried about AI, it's time to be worried about AI. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Wow. Geoff Hinton, one of the most important founders of AI, leaves his job so he can speak out about the potential for harm. ""I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have." https://www.nytimes.com/...
It is notable that AI luminaries are saying such things. We have a lot to worry about because the tech industry is acting irresponsibly https://twitter.com/...
Leading AI researcher Hinton leaves Google and warns: As companies improve their A.I. systems, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary.” ↘️ https://www.nytimes.com/...
👉Seismic from @geoffreyhinton: 'The best hope is for the world's leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. “I don't think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it” https://www.nytimes.com/...
I am not an AI alarmist, but when Geoffrey Hinton starts to sound like Victor Frankenstein it's time to worry. #AI 🤖 via @NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/...
We are a long way from anything approaching a God-like AI controlling humanity: but the chorus of AI specialists warning about what happens when there are too few corporate gatekeepers and/or few regulatory guardrails continues to grow #AI https://www.nytimes.com/...
Hinton is one of the greatest AI scientists to ever live, and he has quit Google in order to talk about the dangers of AI freely. In case anyone was still somehow on the fence about whether things are serious. https://twitter.com/...
It's increasingly hard to ignore the chorus of experts warning us about the dangers of AI. But at @google and @microsoft and @OpenAI, is anyone listening?? ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead https://www.nytimes.com/...
Major news in AI today. Hinton is the father of modern deep learning and AI. Lecun and Bengio were his postdocs. @ilyasut of OpenAI was his student. https://www.nytimes.com/...
When people asked how Hinton could work on AI technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” He does not say that anymore. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
For those of us who've been following AI development for a while, this is astonishing. Hinton is a giant within the world of artificial intelligence. The pessimism from leading experts about the future of this field is incredibly troubling. https://www.nytimes.com/...
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that. But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.” https://www.nytimes.com/..…
A foundational figure in deep learning @geoffreyhinton critiques the current headlong #generativeai rush as resigns from Google, starting with the flood of false photos, videos and text and inability to trust... https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation. But that may be impossible, he said...there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology in secret” h…
Good for Hinton to stand up for what he thinks is right, but his underlying rationale of “It's hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” is disappointing—rooted in the powerful & deceptive myth of AI as a neutral tool. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
Geoffrey Hinton, the AI pioneer who built the first neural networks at Google has left over safety concerns. “I don't think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he said. https://www.nytimes.com/...
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using AI for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said. ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead https://www.nytimes.com/...
“His concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will ‘not be able to know what is true anymore.’...A.I. technologies will also in time upend the job market.” https://www.nytimes.com/...