‘Godfather of AI’ shared chilling warning to world after winning Nobel prize

The man dubbed the ‘Godfather of AI’ has spoken out during his Nobel Prize, delivering a chilling message to all of humanity.

Geoffrey Hinton is one of the most renowned experts of modern AI, and because of this, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024 for his dedicated career working on neural networks.

Called the 'Godfather of AI' after co-developing the backpropagation algorithm in the 1980s, he is someone that truly knows his stuff when it comes to artificial intelligence.

The algorithm is the very things that laid the foundation for the deep learning systems we see today, and up until 2023, he worked at Google and helped to lead AI research.

But Hinton ultimately left his post as he wanted to be able to use free speech when it came to his thoughts on AI and its risks.

Geoffrey Hinton is the Godfather of AI (Getty Images)

At the time he told the BBC: "Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be."

He then added: "Right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning," he said.

"And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that."

While his life’s work was dedicated to advancing AI, sadly, it appears that he regrets it all and during his Nobel speech, he voiced his warnings to all in the room.

He began his speech: "Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, excellencies, dear laureates, ladies and gentlemen; this year, the Nobel Committees in Physics and Chemistry, have recognised the dramatic progress being made in a new form of artificial intelligence that uses artificial neural networks to learn how to solve difficult computational problems.

“This new form of AI excels at modelling human intuition, rather than human reasoning, and it will enable us to create highly intelligent and knowledgeable assistants who will increase productivity in almost all industries.”

He warned of the dangers of using AI (Getty stock images)

He added: “If the benefits of the increased productivity can be shared equally, it will be a wonderful advance for all humanity.

“Unfortunately, the rapid progress in AI comes with many short-term risks.

“It has already created divisive echo chambers by offering people content that makes them indignant."

Hinton warned viewers that AI is causing harm by creating echo chambers online and is also being used by ‘authoritarian governments’ to conduct mass surveillance, as well as helping criminals to run global scams.

He went on to warn that AI might soon be used to create autonomous weapons or even viruses to harm populations.

The worst part is that he said there could be a time where advanced digital beings are created that may not be controllable.