Nobel Prize winner and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton was awakened in the middle of the night last year with the surprising news that he had won the Nobel Prize in physics, a recognition he never expected for his groundbreaking work in neural networks.
“I dreamt about winning one for figuring out how the brain works. But I didn’t figure out how the brain works, but I won one anyway,” Hinton told CBS Saturday Morning in a recent interview.
The 77-year-old researcher, often called the “Godfather of AI,” earned the prestigious award for his pioneering work in neural networks. His 1986 method to predict the next word in a sequence became the foundation for today’s Large Language Models (LLMs).

Geoffrey Hinton’s sees AI as a “tiger cub” that might eventually kill humans

Despite his contributions to the field, Hinton has become increasingly concerned about AI’s rapid development. In his CBS interview, he warned that people “haven’t understood what’s coming” and compared humanity’s relationship with AI to raising a tiger cub that might eventually turn dangerous.
“The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub,” Hinton explained. “Unless you can be very sure that it’s not gonna want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry.”
Hinton estimates a 10% to 20% chance that artificial intelligence will eventually take control from humans, echoing concerns from industry leaders like Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. However, he criticizes these same companies for prioritizing profits over safety and lobbying against regulation.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech last December, Hinton addressed both the potential benefits and dangers of AI:
“This new form of AI excels at modeling human intuition rather than human reasoning and it will enable us to create highly intelligent and knowledgeable assistants,” he said. “If the benefits of the increased productivity can be shared equally it will be a wonderful advance for all humanity.”
However, he cautioned about immediate risks like divisive echo chambers, government surveillance, and cyber attacks, as well as the existential threat of creating digital beings smarter than humans. “We urgently need research on how to prevent these new beings from wanting to take control,” Hinton warned. “They are no longer science fiction.”