During our two-hour lunch, we cover a lot of ground: from nuclear threats (“A normal person assisted by AI will soon be able to build bioweapons and that is terrible. Imagine if an average person in the street could make a nuclear bomb”) to his own AI habits (it is “extremely useful”) and how the chatbot became an unlikely third wheel in his most recent break-up.
But first, Hinton launches into an enthusiastic mini-seminar on why artificial intelligence is an appropriate term: “By any definition of intelligence, AI is intelligent.” Registering the humanities graduate before him, he uses half a dozen different analogies to convince me that AI’s experience of reality is not so distinct from that of humans.
“It seems very obvious to me. If you talk to these things and ask them questions, it understands,” Hinton continues. “There’s very little doubt in the technical community that these things will get smarter.”
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton: ‘AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer’ https://t.co/RZu9DMxw7p
— Financial Times (@FT) September 5, 2025