Topic
29 facts from 9 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2012
AlexNet was a convolutional neural network built by Alex Krizhevsky, with Ilya Sutskever and advisor Geoffrey Hinton.
“Jeff Hinton was the PhD advisor of Alex. They call it AlexNet. What is it? It is a convolutional neural network, which is a branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning.”
2012
Geoffrey Hinton's team ended the auction for DNN Research at $44 million and chose to join Google.
“they stop the bidding at $44 million and just say, Google, this is more than enough money.”
2023-2024
Geoffrey Hinton says cyberattacks rose about twelvefold between 2023 and 2024, which he attributes probably to large language models making phishing easier.
“between 2023 and 2024, they increased by about a factor of twelve, 1,200%. And that's probably because these large language models make it much easier to do phishing attacks.”
2023
Geoffrey Hinton says he timed his departure from Google so he could speak freely about AI safety at an MIT conference organised by MIT Technology Review.
“The precise timing of when I left Google was so that I could talk freely at a conference at M I T”
2024
Rana El Kaliouby says Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton raised concerns that OpenAI is focused less on safety and more on profit.
“recently, Nobel Prize winner and computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton raised some concerns that OpenAI is, um, focused less on safety and perhaps more on profit.”
2024
Gomez says Geoffrey Hinton, who taught at the University of Toronto where Gomez studied, recently won the Nobel Prize and is regarded as the godfather of deep learning.
“obviously Jeff recently won the Nobel Prize. He's kind of like, uh, attributed with being the the godfather of of deep learning in U of T, the school where I went.”
2026
The paper on automated AI R&D and a possible intelligence explosion lists co-authors including OpenAI chief scientist Jakob Pachocki, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.
“With notable co-authors that include OpenAI chief scientist Jakob Pachocki, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Jeffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and more.”
2029
Tony Robbins says Ray Kurzweil has predicted artificial general intelligence by 2029, while Geoffrey Hinton gives 2030 to 2040.
“Ray Kurzweil's a good friend of mine, he's the most accurate predictor of technology in history, and he's been saying 2029 for almost 20 years is when we have artificial general intelligence.”
Undated
Aidan Gomez said he and cofounder Nick worked under Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto before founding Cohere.
“We were both working for Jeff Hinton in Toronto, and he was the guy who kind of created neural networks.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says he pushed the neural-network approach to AI for about 50 years while few people believed in it.
“I pushed that approach for like 50 years because so few people believed in it.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says John von Neumann and Alan Turing both believed in brain-modelled AI, and that AI's history would have differed had either lived longer.
“Early on, von Neumann believed it and Turing believed it. And if either of those had lived, I think AI would have had a very different history.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says European AI regulations contain a clause stating they do not apply to military uses of AI.
“the European regulations have a a clause in them that say none of these regulations apply to military uses of AI.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says he split his and his children's money across three Canadian banks to hedge against a cyberattack taking down one bank.
“So I spread my money, my children's money, between three banks, in the belief that if a cyber attack takes down one Canadian bank, the other Canadian banks will very quickly get very careful.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says a friend in Sussex had a drone costing under 200 pounds that could follow him through woods.
“I was visiting a friend of mine in Sussex who had a drone that cost less than 200 pounds, and the drone went up.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says the object-recognition network was named AlexNet and the company he, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky founded was DNNresearch.
“the network that recognized objects was called Alex Net. The company was called D N N Research, Deep Neural Network Research.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says he joined Google at age 65 after the company acquired his technology.
“I went at age sixty five to work at Google.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says he taught a Coursera course hoping to earn money, but it earned little, which led him to sell his work to a big company.
“I taught a Coursera course in the hope that I'd make lots of money that way, but there was no money in that.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton describes distillation, which he worked on at Google, as transferring the knowledge of a large neural network into a small one.
“distillation is a way of taking what a big model knows, a big neural net knows, and getting that knowledge into a small neural net.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says his closest moment to a revelation about AI's ability was when Google's PaLM system explained why a joke was funny.
“The closest I had to a eureka moment was when a Google system called Palm was able to say why a joke was funny”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says he believes OpenAI promised a significant share of its compute to safety research and later reduced that share.
“It would use a significant fraction of its resources of the compute time for doing safety research, and then it kept, then it reduced that fraction.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton cites automatic teller machines as a past technology that did not cause bank teller joblessness, but argues AI is different.
“When automatic teller machines came in, a lot of bank tellers didn't lose their jobs, they just got to do more interesting things.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says his niece's complaint-letter work fell from 25 minutes to about five with a chatbot, meaning five times fewer people are needed.
“My niece answers letters of complaint to a health service. It used to take her 25 minutes.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton guesses that superintelligence will arrive within ten to twenty years, though he says it could be sooner or around fifty years away.
“My guess is between ten and twenty years we'll have superintelligence.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says digital neural networks can share information by averaging their weights at trillions of bits per second, billions of times faster than human communication.
“These things are transferring trillions of bits a second, so they're billions of times better than us at sharing information.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton says he asked GPT-4, without web access, why a compost heap is like an atom bomb, to test whether it could see analogies.
“at the point when G P T four couldn't look on the web, I asked it, Why is a compost heap like an atom bomb?”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton recalls a video of the US education secretary referring to AI in classrooms as 'A1'.
“I've seen the video of the US. education secretary talking about how they're gonna get AI in the classrooms, except she thought it was called A1.”
Undated
Steven Bartlett says Hinton's great-great-grandfather George Boole founded Boolean algebra, a foundational principle of modern computer science.
“Your great great grandfather George Bull founded the Boolean algebra logic, which is one of the foundational principles of modern computer science.”
Undated
Geoffrey Hinton predicted that AI would replace radiologists because they read medical images.
“Jeff Hinton famously said, Hey, you know, reading medical images, that's what radiologists do, that's going to be replaced by AI.”
Undated
When asked what hardware he uses for his discoveries, Geoffrey Hinton reportedly pointed to his laptop.
“he pointed to his laptop and tapped it and said, This is this is the hardware I use”
Episodes