Geoffrey Hinton

“I think we're going to see AI get even better. It's already extremely good. We're going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It's already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it's going to be able to replace many other jobs.”

Geoffrey HintonResearcher

Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto; 2024 Nobel laureate in Physics; Turing Award laureate

Hinton was asked for his 2026 predictions after calling 2025 a pivotal year; he tied the forecast to AI task length roughly doubling every seven months. The 2026 outcome is not yet judgeable.

“I think in five years' time it [AI] may well be able to reason better than us.”

Geoffrey HintonResearcher

Turing Award-winning computer scientist, the "Godfather of AI"; former Google Brain researcher

Hinton made the remark to Scott Pelley after testing GPT-4 with a reasoning riddle; the five-year horizon runs to the end of 2028.

“AI will outstrip the world's best mathematicians within a decade — mathematics is a closed system, like chess and Go, where models can generate their own conjectures, test them, learn from failures and compound endlessly without much more data.”

Geoffrey HintonResearcher

Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto; 2024 Nobel laureate in Physics; Turing Award laureate

Deadline is 2036; Hinton made the remark shortly after an AI system proved an Erdős theorem, which he cited as evidence for the closed-system argument.

“I now predict 5 to 20 years [until digital intelligence overtakes us] but without much confidence. We live in very uncertain times. It's possible that I am totally wrong about digital intelligence overtaking us. Nobody really knows which is why we should worry now.”

Geoffrey HintonResearcher

Turing Award and Nobel laureate; 'Godfather of AI'; professor emeritus, University of Toronto (former Google VP)

Posted days after Hinton left Google; it marked a sharp shortening of his previous 30–50 year estimate for machines becoming smarter than humans.

“There is a 10–20% chance that AI leads to human extinction within the next three decades.”

Geoffrey HintonResearcher

Turing Award winner; 'godfather of deep learning'

A probabilistic risk estimate; tracked for the record.

“People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.”

Geoffrey HintonResearcher

Turing Award winner; 'godfather of deep learning'

By 2021 AI had become a useful assistive tool in radiology, but radiologist demand grew — the US faced a radiologist shortage. Hinton later acknowledged the timeline was wrong.