{"id":926609,"date":"2026-10-13T12:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T12:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/926609\/"},"modified":"2026-10-13T12:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T12:20:09","slug":"ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-trump-is-corrupt-senile-felon-who-knows-nothing-about-ai-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/926609\/","title":{"rendered":"AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: Trump is \u2018corrupt, senile felon\u2019 who knows nothing about AI | Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump<\/a> is a \u201ccorrupt, senile felon\u201d whose fixation on the term superintelligence<\/a> proves he knows nothing about AI<\/a>, said Geoffrey Hinton<\/a>, \u201cgodfather\u201d of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.<\/p>\n

The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology\u2019s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers have<\/a> joined<\/a> Hinton in ringing<\/a> the<\/a> alarm<\/a> about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.<\/p>\n

There has also been fierce pushback. Last week the leader of the world\u2019s most valuable<\/a> company singled out the Toronto-based Hinton for a scathing attack.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love [him]. I hate his predictions \u2026 All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions,\u201d Nvidia\u2019s CEO, Jensen Huang, told the podcaster Ezra Klein<\/a>. Huang, whose company makes the chips that AI firms require, dismissed Hinton\u2019s vocal concerns that the pace and breadth of AI development at the \u201cfrontier\u201d could soon outpace the human ability to control it, and particularly his warning<\/a> that there is a 10-20% chance of AI causing human extinction in the coming decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat [figure] is not grounded on science, is not grounded on research. Just because it comes from a scientist doesn\u2019t make it scientific. Those predictions are hurtful,\u201d Huang said. \u201cDon\u2019t think for a second just because you\u2019re an alarmist that you\u2019re doing a social good. It is not true. So I think that we ought to just all be wiser, more mature, be evidence-based, be scientific.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Trump, Mike Johnson and top tech executives, including Jensen Huang, speak outside the West Wing in Washington DC on 29 September. Photograph: Shawn Thew\/EPA<\/p>\n

But Hinton said those criticizing him are missing a broader point about the nature of risk. He is not specifically predicting anything, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m trying to convey that there is a really serious possibility of something happening. If, for example, you\u2019re told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn\u2019t get on the bus,\u201d he said. \u201cThe point of giving numbers is to say this is a serious risk. We don\u2019t know how serious, but it\u2019s serious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recent safety breaches have evoked comparisons to a techno-dystopia story. The recent unwanted hack<\/a> of the tech company Hugging Face<\/a> by a \u201cswarm\u201d of AI agents that escaped the boundaries put on them by their creator has divided the technology community, with some seeing it as an example of what could come, while others accuse critics of anthropomorphizing systems that are simply following instructions. Hinton thinks dismissing the scenarios is unwise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis used to be the domain of science fiction. You\u2019re going to have AI agents and they\u2019re gonna go rogue. Oh, come off it. And they\u2019ll go rogue and they\u2019re going to learn how to communicate with each other, even though we didn\u2019t think there was a way. Oh, come off it!\u201d said Hinton. \u201cAnd when they figure this out, they\u2019re going to have big emotional expressions like, \u2018oh my God!\u2019 Well, of course, they don\u2019t really mean \u2018oh my God\u2019. They\u2019re just parroting the words we use. They\u2019re going to learn to sacrifice themselves for the common good!<\/p>\n

\u201cAll this stuff just a few years ago was written off as complete fantasy. And it\u2019s all happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

He heartily concedes that neither the warnings of AI critics nor the promises of its boosters can rely on precise predictions of what the technology will do. But, he argues, uncertainty is not a reason for complacency. \u201cThe unique problem with AI is that if it goes wrong, if it takes over, you don\u2019t get a second chance. We can\u2019t say, \u2018Well, we lost that time. Let\u2019s rerun the game.\u2019 It\u2019s not like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth noting that Hinton has a record of seeing things where others did not. He toiled in relative obscurity at the University of Toronto<\/a> during two AI \u201cwinters\u201d where his branch of the field \u2013 trying to teach machines to operate in a manner similar to the human brain \u2013 was considered obscure. He was fixated on the idea that, like the brain, computer systems could be designed to learn patterns from data, rather than to follow only explicit, prewritten rules.<\/p>\n

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton at his Toronto home. Photograph: Cole Burston\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believed that if you could figure out how the brain learned, machines learned the same way, and you had enough compute power, they would do amazing things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But the nascent field of neural networks was mocked by his peers.<\/p>\n

As recently as 2009, when Yoshua Bengio<\/a>, Hinton\u2019s Canadian colleague and close collaborator, sent a paper to a machine learning conference, one of the referees told them: \u201cThis paper has no place in a machine learning conference. It\u2019s about neural networks.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took Canada\u2019s government, which funded years of seemingly fruitless tinkering by Hinton and his small team (some of whom, like Bengio, are now dominant figures in the AI field), to realize the possibility of neural nets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2012, he and his students developed<\/a> an image recognition program that vastly outperformed rivals. That year, Google acquired Hinton\u2019s company DNNresearch Inc for $44m; neural nets now underpin the models of the most valuable AI companies. Hinton joined Google to continue his research into deep learning, while also working at the University of Toronto. \u201cIn the long run, huge new breakthroughs come from basic research,\u201d said Hinton.<\/p>\n

The vindication sits on the mantle above the fireplace of Hinton\u2019s red-brick home in a leafy Toronto neighbourhood. Among the jumble of trophies is the small silver dish of the Turing award \u2013 often called the Nobel prize of computing \u2013 which he won alongside Bengio and colleague Yann LeCun. (Hinton also has the Nobel prize<\/a> in physics.)<\/p>\n

But in 2023, Hinton had announced his resignation<\/a> from the tech giant to be able to \u201cfreely speak out about the risks of AI\u201d.<\/p>\n

Today, his concerns extend the powerful figures building some of the AI models, and the political beliefs of those men. Hinton said that the AI venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and the CEO of the newly rebranded SpaceXSI<\/a>, Elon Musk, \u201cdon\u2019t believe in democracy\u201d. They see themselves as \u201c\u00dcbermenschen\u201d who believe they should \u201ccontrol society\u201d and that Trump is a useful instrument<\/a> in that aim, he said.<\/p>\n

The US president, for his part, no doubt noticing how the huge<\/a> valuations<\/a> of AI firms have propped up the stock market, has claimed the only thing needed to rein in AI is a \u201csmart president<\/a>\u201d, rejected any government safeguards in favour of allowing companies to regulate themselves, and wrote<\/a> on his social media page that anyone who doesn\u2019t use his preferred new term for AI, \u201csuper intelligence\u201d, is \u201cTHE ENEMY\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hinton called Trump \u201ca corrupt, senile felon\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure the oil and asbestos companies would have liked to [regulate themselves] as well,\u201d he said. \u201cDo we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s use of \u201csuperintelligence\u201d proves he understands \u201calmost nothing\u201d about AI, Hinton added.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s taken a technical term which has a very clear meaning and then reused it,\u201d Hinton said. \u201cSuperintelligence means smarter than people, and has been around for at least 20 years. It\u2019s got a very clear meaning. And now he says we\u2019re going to call AI \u2018superintelligence\u2019. You can\u2019t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The speed and scope of developments has promoted a worry of catastrophes and of society\u2019s inability to grapple with the nature of the challenge. But Hinton also sees an additional obstacle: helping people understand the \u201calien beings\u201d that the companies are creating.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump poses with National Medal of Science recipients, including Google\u2019s Sergey Brin, Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk on 8 October in Washington DC. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson\/AP<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have a very bad model of what people are, and that\u2019s why they fail to understand how these AI models are very like us. Most people don\u2019t understand what consciousness is. They don\u2019t understand what subjective experience is, and they\u2019re very confident that even though they don\u2019t understand it, they\u2019re sure AI doesn\u2019t have it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He rejects the idea that the human mind possesses some mysterious quality that machines, by definition, cannot share.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s obvious that these AI models understand what they\u2019re saying. You couldn\u2019t possibly answer all the questions without understanding the question. It\u2019s ridiculous to say they don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the scope of shift in societal thinking around these models is profound, said Hinton.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019ve been three big revolutions where people ceased to be so important. The first was Copernicus, where we weren\u2019t at the centre of the universe any more. How long did it take people to adapt to that? It took the Catholic church nearly 360 years to apologize to Galileo. And Darwin? Well, there\u2019s people in Kansas that still haven\u2019t adapted to that one,\u201d he said. \u201cNow we\u2019re creating alien beings \u2013 meaning we\u2019re not the only intelligent beings around. And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent months, the AI giant Anthropic<\/a>, maker of the popular chatbot Claude, has held private meetings<\/a> with religious scholars, theologians and philosophers to look into the possibility of teaching AI to be \u201cgood\u201d and to grapple with the possibility that the models have consciousness. Anthropic\u2019s CEO, Dario Amodei, said the conversations have drawn on centuries of religious and philosophical thought about virtue, compassion, honesty and moral character, with the aim of making ethical behaviour more reliable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you start talking about, \u2018We have a moral obligation towards these alien beings,\u2019 you lose your audience,\u201d said Hinton. \u201cI\u2019ve struggled with this issue. We care about people. [But] we\u2019re making these things and there\u2019s nothing to stop us giving these things \u2013 which are more intelligent than us \u2013 less rights than us. I\u2019m willing to be selfish and choose human beings. Of course, we should try to make them so that they\u2019re very happy in a symbiotic relationship with us, where our concerns are weighed more heavily than their concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hinton is not alone in arguing that the best route to avoid societal collapse is to develop genuinely benevolent models. He hopes that whichever country is the first to develop this capacity, it would tell allies and rivals alike, because \u201cno country wants AI taking over\u201d in another country. There is a \u201cvested interest in sharing knowledge\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is, we\u2019re making beings of a different kind. And the big tech companies keep saying: we want it smarter. This is crazy. We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of that depends on the nature of these models, he said, and their capacity to understand how to develop good behaviour.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you train them on everything on the internet, they develop all sorts of horrible tendencies and then you get them to repress their horrible tendencies,\u201d he said. But suppressing bad behaviour is not the same as creating a good character. \u201cIt seems like the way one would design a Victorian gentleman \u2013 but not something we\u2019ll need to live with.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump is a \u201ccorrupt, senile felon\u201d whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":926610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-926609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=926609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/926610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=926609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=926609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=926609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}