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The Godfather of AI Thinks Something Huge Is About to Happen
Geoffrey Hinton says the intelligence explosion once seemed distant, but now it could be much closer than expected.
Back in 2023, I remember seeing the term “intelligence explosion” come up quite a lot in AI discussions. People were already talking about AI improving itself and what could happen if that process started speeding up, but it never seemed like an immediate concern.
Most of the attention was still on things like bigger models, better chatbots, and the race toward AGI. The intelligence explosion was there in the background, but it still sounded like something we might have to worry about much later.
Geoffrey Hinton apparently doesn’t see it that way anymore.
Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning researcher widely known as the “Godfather of AI”, recently wrote that recursive self-improvement has been discussed for a long time, but “until very recently it did not seem imminent.” Now, he says, many leading researchers think it could happen “quite soon.”
That’s a pretty big change in tone. In fact, some users have criticized him in one of his X posts about this paper:
