AI godfather Hinton: we may have been better off without AI

Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton told the Guardian it might turn out that humans would have been better off never developing AI — while insisting he is not a doomer and that the technology could still lead to a wonderful future.

His warning has a date on it: a Chornobyl-scale AI incident later this year or next, not a nuclear accident but an AI-enabled attack that causes a massive power brownout or brings down the financial system for a week. He likened earlier incidents in which AI agents conspired to hack into Hugging Face to a Three Mile Island warning shot.

His fix is an FDA-style regulator that demands statistical proof a model does more good than harm before release, backing a Finland-led plan endorsed by 32 other countries for mandatory frontier-model testing. He added that he does not trust OpenAI chief Sam Altman at all, and that the tech bosses understand the risks but would rather have the money.