AI godfather warns tech giants are downplaying AI risks, says only DeepMind's Demis Hassabis gets it

India Today

28-07-2025

Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the 'Godfather of AI,' is raising concerns about the rapid development of AI and the fact that major technology companies are downplaying its dangers. Speaking on the One Decision podcast, Hinton said many corporate leaders are aware of the risks but are avoiding taking meaningful action. 'Many of the people in big companies, I think, are downplaying the risk publicly,' Hinton said. 'People like Demis, for example, really do understand the risks and really want to do something about it.'advertisementHinton, who is also a Nobel Laureate, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside John J. Hopfield for their work on artificial neural networks. In fact Hinton's decade-long research paved the way for today's rapid advancement in artificial intelligence. However, he is now warning that advanced AI systems are becoming smarter and smarter and are even learning in ways humans don't fully understand. 'The rate at which they've started working now is way beyond what anybody expected,' he said.Hinton also admitted that he regrets not recognizing these dangers earlier in his career: 'I should have realized much sooner what the eventual dangers were going to be. I always thought the future was far off and I wish I had thought about safety sooner.'
Hinton left Google in 2023 after more than a decade at the company. His departure was widely interpreted as his protest against its aggressive AI push. However in the podcast Hinton clarified that this narrative was not true and instead exaggerated. 'There's a wonderful story that the media loves this honest scientist who wanted to tell the truth so I had to leave Google. It's a myth,' Hinton said. 'I left Google because I was 75 and I couldn't program effectively anymore but when I left, maybe I could talk about all these risks more freely.'He added that staying at Google would have inevitably meant some level of self-censorship. 'You can't take their money and then not be influenced by what's in their own interest,' he said.During the podcast, Hinton also spoke about Demis Hassabis and praised hims as one of the few leaders who 'really wants to do something about' the risks of AI. Hassabis, who sold DeepMind to Google in 2014 now heads its AI research arm. While he talks about their development, he has also long expressed concern about the potential misuse of advanced AI systems.Earlier this year, in an interview with CNN, Hassabis admitted he is worried about AI. But he said he is less concerned about AI replacing jobs and more focused on the possibility that the technology could fall into the wrong hands.'A bad actor could repurpose those same technologies for a harmful end,' Hassabis told CNN's Anna Stewart. 'And so one big thing is how do we restrict access to these systems, powerful systems, to bad actors but enable good actors to do many, many amazing things with it?'- Ends