Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI
- ID
- 43110
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 04 Nov 2026, 6:23 PM
- Fetched
- 05 Nov 2026, 4:13 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/nov/03/ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-better-off-without-ai
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 05 Nov 2026, 4:13 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
In a Guardian interview published 3 Nov 2026, Geoffrey Hinton, 78, said it “might be that we would have been better off never developing” AI and warned a major incident—such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems—could happen this year or next. He said humanity should know within a decade whether AI risks can be managed, framing the outcome as either “radical abundance” or massive unemployment and societal breakdown, and said he does not trust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “at all,” naming Zuckerberg and Musk as leaders who understand the risks but prioritize money. The piece precedes a documentary, AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About, whose title Hinton says was suggested by an AI chatbot.
Why it matters
There is no code, model, price, or regulation change here; for teams building on frontier US models, this is reputational and risk-narrative context, not evidence of an outage or vendor defect. If you are writing an AI risk section for a client or investor, do not cite Hinton’s “don’t give a shit” quote as a finding—it is an allegation/opinion, and the article gives no reliability or pricing data to justify switching providers.
Discussion angle
Hinton says frontier-lab leaders understand the risks but prioritize money—does that change how you evaluate model vendors, or is safety commentary from a Nobel laureate still too abstract to affect shipping decisions?