Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate known as the godfather of AI, was on the program to brief the 27 EU leaders in Dublin on Friday morning, carrying a timeline that he says scares even him: the one he now hears from Paul Christiano, the AI safety researcher OpenAI put on its board in September.
"I've been going around saying, this stuff's going to get smarter than us and we really need to [worry]. It might happen within 10 years. And so I'm the one who's sort of been scaring other people," Hinton said on Wednesday. "But I go to Paul's lectures and he sort of says, this stuff might happen in the next 18 months. And that's terrifying."
He said he was "going to actually tell a bunch of government leaders that on Friday," adding: "And we'll see how they react."
"That's terrifying!"
Geoffrey Hinton used to say we have 10 years until AI outsmarts humanity.
Paul Christiano convinced him that timelines might be as short as 18 months, a terrifying prospect. pic.twitter.com/y75nO6JD2D— Ori Nagel (@ONagel33303) November 13, 2026
Christiano, who founded the Alignment Research Center and helped develop the RLHF training method behind today's chatbots, opened this year's Hinton
