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This is on point. I'm Megynchakrabardi.

In 2024, Jeffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics, a category that somewhat amused him, as we'll hear about in just a moment.

The Nobel Committee gave him the award for, quote, foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.

He shared the honor with John Hopfield.

Earlier in 2018, Hinton and two other longtime collaborators,

Yoshua Benjiou and Jan Lee Kuhn,

also received the Turing Award,

which is often called the Nobel Prize of Computing,

for their work on neural networks.

Hinton's work is so foundational

that he's considered to be the godfather of a civilization

changing technology that emerged from artificial neural networks. In other words, he's called the

godfather of AI. From 2013 to 2023, Professor Hinton worked for Google's deep learning artificial intelligence team.

He's currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.

And given his illustrious position in the development of artificial intelligence, your ears perk up when you hear that Jeffrey Hinton also says there is a chance that the very thing he contributed to creating could destroy humanity itself.

And he joins us now. Professor Hinton, welcome to On Point.

Hello.

Before we get to the doomsday scenario, I'd love to actually spend some time understanding your work

better so that it helps us take your potential predictions here, which much greater seriousness.

So I understand at the beginning of your career studying neural networks, someone once called

it the unglamorous subfield of neural networks. Do you think

...