In an interview with CBS Saturday Morning, Hinton said AI had developed even faster than he had originally expected, citing the acceleration of AI agents as a particularly scary development.

He also predicted that artificial general intelligence, a theoretical AI system that possesses humanlike cognitive abilities, could arrive in 10 years or less.

Hinton, who is one of the creators of key neural network technologies, has long warned that AI could pose an existential threat to humans.

In 2023, he left Google after becoming deeply concerned about the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) could pose to humanity. At the time, he said he wanted to speak openly about these dangers without being restricted by his ties to a major tech company.

He has previously warned that AI systems might one day become smarter than humans and act in ways we cannot control—potentially posing a threat to humanity itself.

In the interview, which aired late last week, Hinton doubled down on these concerns.

“If you consider the possibility that these things will get much smarter than us and then just take control away from us, just take over, the probability of that happening is very likely more than 1% and very likely less than 99%. Pretty much all the experts can agree on that,” he said.

“I’m in the unfortunate position of happening to agree with Elon Musk on this, which is that it’s sort of 10% to 20% chance that these things will take over,” he said, adding that it was still just a “wild guess.”

“The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub,” Hinton explained. “Unless you can be very sure that it’s not gonna want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry.”

He stressed that if the world continued to approach AI with a profit-driven mindset, there was a bigger likelihood of an AI takeover or bad actors co-opting the technology for dangerous means like mass surveillance.

“If you look at what the big companies are doing right now, they’re lobbying to get less AI regulation. There’s hardly any regulation as it is, but they want less,” Hinton said. “We have to have the public put pressure on governments to do something serious about it.”

Hinton is not the only AI godfather speaking out about the technology he helped to create. Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Award alongside Hinton in 2018, has also warned that AI could outsmart humans and potentially stage a takeover.  

Bengio has gone slightly further in warning about the dangers of AI, saying he feels guilt for helping to invent deep learning because it can now be misused in dangerous ways.

AI’s impact on the world

Despite his concerns, Hinton said there was also reason to be optimistic about the impact AI will have on the world, pointing to health care, drug development, and education as areas in which AI could improve the human experience.

AI has already shown signs of reaching a human level of diagnostic skills, but it falls short in other areas.

In education, the rise of AI tutors could help personalize education for students and offload some of teachers’ workloads. OpenAI has already partnered with several leading universities to give students and staff access to funding and “cutting-edge” AI tools.

Hinton said the rise of personalized AI tutors would be “bad news for universities but good news for people.”

He also changed his stance on job displacement from AI, saying he was now worried that people may lose their jobs because of the technology and warned it could exacerbate wealth disparity.