Geoffrey Hinton warns that AI will become much smarter than humans within decades and urges focus on creating AI beings that care about people rather than seeking only intelligence.

Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024, said he believes there is a 10% to 20% chance that AI causes human extinction within 30 years, and that AI will surpass human intelligence within his remaining lifetime.

He argued that language models can become vastly smarter without requiring much more data by using internal inconsistencies as training signals, and predicted AI will outstrip the world's best mathematicians within a decade and eventually match Albert Einstein's level—'maybe not in the next few years, but if you think about the next 20 years.'

Hinton contended that the core problem is not intelligence itself but what kind of beings are being created: companies optimizing for profit in a competitive race will produce AI that is 'not nice beings towards us,' and he warned that deliberately engineering AI with values like care and protection for humans requires effort that 'nobody's putting much effort into.'