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Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning computer scientist widely described as one of the “godfathers of artificial intelligence,” said humanity might have been better off never developing the technology, and predicted a “Chernobyl”-style AI incident as soon as this year or next.
Hinton warned that AI could trigger large-scale disruptions, including temporary outages in financial systems or electricity grids. He said the event he has in mind is not nuclear. It could instead be an AI-assisted attack that causes “a major outage” of the power generation system, or an incident that brings down the financial system for a week.
“Either later this year or next year we will see Chernobyl, and that might be enough for people to really pay attention,” Hinton said. Chornobyl refers to the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine, near the Belarus border.
Hinton said he is not a “doomer” and believes AI can create a “wonderful future.” He added: “It might be that we would have been better off never developing it.”
Hinton said he does not trust Sam Altman “at all.” Altman is the head of OpenAI, one of a handful of leading AI companies racing China to build the most powerful AI. Hinton called that “extremely worrying.” Several major companies keep releasing increasingly powerful models as they compete for dominance and market share.
Hinton also named Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk alongside Altman.
“I think Zuckerberg, Musk and Sam Altman are aware of the risks and they do not care,” he said. “They would rather have the money. That is my belief.”
Hinton has worked on AI for about 44 years. In the 1970s, he proposed the “neural network,” a mathematical system that can learn and gain experience much like humans. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield for work on neural networks
In 2023, he left Google to speak freely about the risks of AI. At the time, he warned: “If these systems go too far in gaining more control, we are in trouble.”
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