The ‘godfather of AI’ says we’re not just creating new beings — they’ll be much smarter than us, and soon

Geoffrey Hinton almost didn’t believe he’d won the Nobel Prize. When the committee called in 2024, the 77-year-old computer scientist ran a quick calculation in his head. What are the odds, he asked himself, that a theoretical psychologist hiding in computer science gets the Nobel Prize in physics? “Well, maybe one in two million,” he told the crowd at the Sana AI Summit in New York last week. Then again: what are the odds you dream about winning it? “Maybe one in two million … So that means it’s a million times more likely it’s a dream than reality.” The audience laughed. Hinton wasn’t done. For several days after the announcement, he said, he half-expected to wake up. The one thing that consoled him: “If it was a dream, I would wake up, and that nightmare about Trump being president wouldn’t be true.” A beat. The audience laughed as Hinton added, “I’d give it up for that.” It’s the kind of remark that lands differently when the man delivering it also believes there’s a 10% to 20% chance that AI causes human extinction within 30 years — and that AI will surpass human intelligence within his remaining lifetime. ‘Much more intelligent’ Hinton was in conversation with Joel Hellermark, the 29-year-old founder and CEO of Sana AI, who had promised him a Nobel Prize the last time they appeared on this stage. This time Hellermark had harder questions. And Hinton — in his characteristically unhurried, occasionally hilarious way — gave answers that were by turns technically precise and cosmically vertiginous. The through-line: not only are we building beings, they are going to be much smarter than us. And we are running out of time to decide what kind of beings they should be. “I think it’s going to get much more intelligent than us — that’s my guess,” Hinton said. Nobody will ever beat them at Go or at chess again, he predicted, and