‘Godfather of A.I.’ leaves Google after a decade to warn society of technology he’s touted
Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton speaks at the Thomson Reuters Financial and Risk Summit in Toronto, December 4, 2017.
Mark Blinch | Reuters
Geoffrey Hinton, known as “The Godfather of AI,” received his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence 45 years ago and has remained one of the most respected voices in the field.
For the past decade Hinton worked part-time at Google, between the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters and Toronto. But he has quit the internet giant, and he told the New York Times that he’ll be warning the world about the potential threat of AI, which he said is coming sooner than he previously thought.
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“I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away,” Hinton told the Times, in a story published Monday. “Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Hinton, who was named a 2018 Turing Award winner for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs, said he now has some regrets over his life’s work, the Times reported, citing near-term risks of AI taking jobs, and the proliferation of fake photos, videos and text that appear real to the average person.
In a statement to CNBC, Hinton said, “I now think the digital intelligences we are creating are very different from biological intelligences.”
Hinton referenced the power of GPT-4, the most-advanced large language model (LLM) from startup OpenAI, whose technology has gone viral since the chatbot ChatGPT was launched late last year. Here’s how he described what’s happening now:
“If I have 1000 digital agents who are all exact clones with identical weights, whenever one agent learns how to do something, all of them immediately know it because they share weights,” Hinton told CNBC. “Biological agents cannot do this. So collections of identical digital agents can acquire hugely more knowledge than any individual biological agent. That is why GPT-4 knows hugely more than any one person.”
Hinton was sounding the alarm even before leaving Google. In an interview with CBS News that aired in March, Hinton was asked what he thinks the “chances are of AI just wiping out humanity.” He responded, “It’s not inconceivable. That’s all I’ll say.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has also publicly warned of the risks of AI. He told “60 Minutes” last month that society isn’t prepared for what’s coming. At the same time, Google is showing off its own products, like self-learning robots and Bard, its ChatGPT competitor.
But when asked if “the pace of change can outstrip our ability to adapt,” Pichai downplayed the risk. “I don’t think so. We’re sort of an infinitely adaptable species,” he said.
Over the past year, Hinton has reduced his time at Google, according to an internal document viewed by CNBC. In March of 2022, he moved to 20% of full-time. Later in the year he was assigned to a new team within Brain Research. His most recent role was vice president and engineering fellow, reporting to Jeff Dean within Google Brain.
In an emailed statement to CNBC, Dean said he appreciated Hinton for “his decade of contributions at Google.”
“I’ll miss him, and I wish him well!” Dean wrote. “As one of the first companies to publish AI Principles, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”
Hinton’s departure is a high-profile loss for Google Brain, the team behind much of the company’s work in AI. Several years ago, Google reportedly spent $44 million to acquire a company started by Hinton and two of his students in 2012.
His research group made major breakthroughs in deep learning that accelerated speech recognition and object classification. Their technology would help form new ways of using AI, including ChatGPT and Bard.
Google has rallied teams across the company to integrate Bard’s technology and LLMs into more products and services. Last month, the company said it would be merging Brain with DeepMind to “significantly accelerate our progress in AI.”
According to the Times, Hinton said he quit his job at Google so he could freely speak out about the risks of AI. He told the paper, “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”
Hinton tweeted on Monday, “I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.”
Hinge Health’s Enso product.
Courtesy: Hinge Health
Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.
Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.
The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.
“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”
The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.
Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.
The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.
Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.
Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.
Hinge Health declined to comment.
People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.
As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.
Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.
JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.
“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.
The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.
WATCH: PayPal CEO Alex Chriss on opportunities for consumers and small businesses
Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle issued quarterly results on Monday that trailed analysts’ estimates, but the company offered bullish comments on its cloud infrastructure segment.
Here is how Oracle did compared to LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: $1.47 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
- Revenue: $14.13 billion vs. $14.39 billion expected
Revenue increased 6% from $13.3 billion in the same period last year. Net income rose 22% to $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, from $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in Oracle’s cloud services business jumped 10% from a year earlier to $11.01 billion, accounting for 78% of total sales.
The company’s cloud infrastructure segment, which helps businesses move workloads out of their own data centers, has been booming due to demand for computing power that can support artificial intelligence projects. Oracle said revenue in its cloud infrastructure unit increased 49% from a year earlier to $2.7 billion.
“We are on schedule to double our data center capacity this calendar year,” Oracle Chair Larry Ellison said in a release. “Customer demand is at record levels.”
In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. in collaboration with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank. The first initiative of the joint venture, called Stargate, will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said during the announcement at the White House.
Oracle’s cloud and on-premises licenses business contributed $1.1 billion in revenue during the quarter, down 10% year over year.
Oracle also said it is increasing its quarterly dividend to 50 cents a share from 40 cents.
As of Monday’s close, the stock is down almost 11% year to date.
Oracle will hold its quarterly call with investors and will share its outlook at 5 p.m. ET.
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