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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

People seem to oddly not care what Hinton thinks anymore after he hasn't aligned with the groupthink naysaying of AGI risks:

'Hinton said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.'

“Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought.”

“My worry is that the invisible hand is not going to keep us safe. So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely,” he said. “The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...

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Hinton also said we should stop training radiologists 10 years ago because it would be solved by AI.

That's not accurate, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xE2HzcHWPFS9EsJqN/radiology-...

He seems pretty unequivocal in the video: https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ . He even points out that it’s something which he’s claimed previously, ruling out the idea that it was some kind of spur-of-the-moment conclusion.

Perhaps, but as the other article points out, the human requirement in radiology has a lot to do with legal and insurance requirements. This is similar to how a lawyer may not be better than an AI but the job is still exclusive to humans.

Yes, Hinton's prediction was inaccurate.

I was at a major radiology conference recently and the radiologists kinda seemed to agree. (The interventional radiologists are a little less nervous, for now.)

Apparently 80% of FDA-approved AI "medical devices" (which covers software, not just hardware) are for radiology.

(https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-...)

This just underscores the point. Despite the advancement of "AI medical devices", the labor market numbers for radiology show Hinton was spectacularly incorrect.

If we had followed his advice we would be experiencing a major crisis in medicine today.

But is it a "he was wrong" scenario, or is it a "he wasn't quite right on the timing" bit, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry ?

He is wrong by every conceivable measure. Not only was his timing wrong, where he specifically noted 10 years as the absolute maximum worst case scenario, but the trend has been accelerating in completely the opposite direction.

To his credit, he actually made a falsifiable prediction, unlike most folks that rely on infinite timelines so they never have to be accountable for their prognostications.

The only way to never make wrong predictions is to not make any.

And yet, here we are in a thread full of them.

Why do you cite him from 2024 when he spoke about it much more recently? This is a quickly moving field after all

> “I think we’re going to see AI get even better,” Hinton replied. “It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs.”

https://fortune.com/2025/12/28/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-...

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