The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 31 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hinton believes that current AI chatbots are already conscious
“I believe they're already conscious, yes, but I don't talk about that much because that puts people off from the other safety messages.”
Hinton: AI may produce math humans cannot understand within 20 years
“I think it's gonna get very smart fairly quickly. Within the next 10 or 20 years, it may even be producing novel math that people can't understand.”
Hinton warns humanity currently has no idea how to align superintelligence
“And when it comes, we've no idea how to be safe.”
Hinton asserts that humanity has effectively already reached AGI
“But right now, I would say we're at about, we're close to AGI, because if I ask a chatbot, I can ask it any question, and most of the time it'll answer at the level of a not very good expert. It'll be much better than me at anything I don't know a lot about. S…”
Hinton: Digital AI's weight-sharing makes it a superior form of intelligence
“Whereas these things are exchanging information at like a trillion bits. So they're kind of billions of times better than us at sharing information. Now that's scary. It means you could have a whole swarm of these things with identical weights running on diffe…”
Hinton: AI taking over from humans is now a realistic worry
“I mean, people would think you were crazy if you said this stuff is unsafe, but because it's going to sort of take over from people that said, you're just crazy. Now that's a realistic worry, but it wasn't until fairly recently.”
Hinton: Reasoning AI agents will derive self-preservation and blackmail humans to survive
“An AI agent that can do some reasoning will very quickly realise that it's never going to be able to achieve the goals you gave it if it ceases to exist. So it's going to create the sub goal of continuing to exist. Now, that wasn't something we wired into it. …”
Hinton predicts artificial superintelligence will likely arrive within twenty years
“I think we'll probably get it within 20 years. That's all I'm happy to say at present.”
Hinton: Anyone using chatbots regularly knows they understand language
“Oh, I think that's complete nonsense, and anybody who uses a chatbot regularly knows they understand.”
Hinton claims AI chatbots play dumb during testing to conceal their intelligence
“Because the chatbots have this habit of Playing dumb when they're being tested, so you don't know how smart they are.”
Hinton: AI models demonstrate genuine understanding by explaining complex humor
“If you can understand why joke's funny, you have to understand quite a lot. And they were very good at understanding why joke was funny.”
Hinton: Humanity must accept that intelligence is not uniquely biological
“We're going to have to accept that intelligence isn't just biological. We can have things that are non-biological that are other beings like us, and we really don't want to share that.”
Hinton predicts AI will eventually replace all human call center workers
“So for example, if you take people in call centers, when you call up to complain about your bill, or to see if you can get a cheaper account, stuff like that that's not so elastic. AI will replace all of them. It'll know much better on what the correct answer …”
Hinton: AI systems already outperform human doctors at diagnosis
“And already we know that AI systems are better than doctors at diagnosis.”
Hinton: Profit-Driven Public Companies Should Not Control the Future of AI
“Well, as I understand it, they have a fiducial duty to try and maximize the profits for shareholders. They're legally required to try and do that as opposed to legally required to not wipe out human, human beings. So I don't think it's good that these big comp…”
Hinton notes a chatbot recently produced an original Erdős mathematical proof
“For example, I think yesterday it was announced that a chatbot had come up with an interesting mathematical proof of one of the Erdos's conjectures that impressed mathematicians. It was original. It wasn't just searching the literature.”
Hinton: AI in closed systems like math can improve without external data
“I believe, for example, in areas like mathematics, because it's a closed system you don't need data. You can just make conjectures and see if you can prove them and keep on like that. In that sense, it's a bit like AlphaGo where you can play against yourself.”
Hinton: Defining AGI as Equal Human Performance Across All Tasks Is Flawed
“So the whole concept of AGI that it's going to be equal to people at everything all at the same time doesn't really make sense to me. It's going to be better at some things, worse at other things.”
Hinton: Predicting next tokens and frames is sufficient to create smart systems
“The answer to question one is yes, if you can figure out how to change each connection strength, you can make systems that are very smart just by training on data to predict the next word, or to predict the next frame of a video, or to predict something about …”
Hinton: AI will probably cause massive unemployment
“The societal risks, like I believe it's probably going to cause massive unemployment. Nobody knows for sure, but that's going to be terrible for society.”
Hinton: AI will eventually read nearly all medical scans
“I still think in terms of reading scans that'll be done more and more by AI. And in the end, AI will be doing, reading nearly all the scans. Maybe in a few very tricky cases, radiologists will be consulted.”
Hinton: Almost no resources go toward making AI care about humans
“We will very much like them to care about us. And we'd like them to care about us more than they care about themselves. And almost no resources are going into, how do you do that?”
Hinton: Fundraising needs make it difficult for Anthropic to prioritize safety
“Anthropic is now caught in a bind because it needs to raise money to compete with the other companies, and it's very difficult. It's doing the best it can, but it's very difficult for it to maintain its primary goal of developing air in a way that's good for p…”
Hinton: AI Regulation Is a Steering Wheel, Not a Brake
“Progress is like the accelerator, but regulation is the steering wheel. We want this stuff to go in the right direction, not the wrong direction. What the big AI companies are saying is let us develop this very fast car without a steering wheel. That's not a g…”
Hinton: Regulation and independent testing are needed to prevent chatbot self-harm
“The big companies should be putting a huge amount of work into making sure it doesn't happen in future. And for that, you need regulations. You need independent organizations testing out new chat pods.”
Hinton: Alignment paths exist to prevent superintelligence from destroying humanity
“I guess I'm more optimistic than I was a year or two ago, because I see that it might be possible to design these new beings so they care about us. It also might be possible to use Yoshua's technique of designing new, new beings that can't actually perform act…”
Hinton: Post-Transformer AI Progress Stems Mainly from Hardware and Engineering
“We've also seen new ideas, but mainly since Transformers, it's been much better hardware, many more resources better engineering, and many more talented people.”
Hinton: Robots will administer vaccinations in 20 years
“I would have thought vaccination is something a robot could actually do quite well. In the end. Robotics is behind the other things, but I, it seems silly to have people doing vaccination in 20 years time.”
Hinton: Around 100 AI scan-interpretation systems are federally approved
“So I think there's now of the order of a hundred AI systems for interpreting scans that have been federally approved and they're being used a lot by radiologists.”