‘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.”
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom
AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.
Courtesy: AMD
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.
The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries.
Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models.
AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”
“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note.
Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.
The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.
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