“Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton Rings the Warning Bells
(from On with Kara Swisher, Nov 13 2025)
(It should be available on Youtube later: Channel https://www.youtube.com/@onwithkaraswisher)
Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the “godfathers of AI” for his pioneering work in deep learning and neural networks, joins Kara to discuss the technology he helped create — and how to mitigate the existential risks it poses.
Hinton explains both the short- and long-term dangers he sees in the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, from its potential to undermine democracy to the existential threat of machines surpassing human intelligence. He offers a thoughtful, complex perspective on how to craft national and international policies to keep AI in check and weighs in on whether the AI bubble is about to burst. Plus: why your mom might be the best model for creating a safe AI.
I think there are plenty of warnings even before the Christmas holiday time…Do.Not.Buy.AI.Toys.For.Your.Children!
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My latest adventure with GenAI
We have an enterprise version of Copilot that is tied into the rest of our MS ecosystem (teams/outlook/onedrive/sharepoint). Yesterday I tried to get it to draft me a powerpoint presentation. We’ve run into an unexpected issue with one of the products we’re building so I need to go to management with a proposal. So I wanted to put together a deck that lays it all out - what the issue is, what decisions brought us here, our options and the risk assessments for each, my recommendations, lessons learned etc.
My prompt included:
- a description of the problem
- pointing it to various teams chats and meetings (with recordings) where the issues were discussed, and summarized the take homes and relevance of each source of information
- I summarized my take on the situation
- I described the task I was giving it, describing the audience, the purpose of the conversation I wanted this presentation to facilitate, and the points the presentation needed to cover
- Finally, there is a standard template we have to use for PPT so I uploaded a version of that for it use for slides it creates.
This is the sort of junior analyst task that people who are big on current capabilities of GenAI LLMs say the tech is good for. It processed for 5 mins (encouraging that it going through the depth required), it gave me a summary description of what it did (consistent with what I asked), then gave me a link to download the draft it prepared. So, how do you think it did? It simply gave me the template presentation I provided it, but with a new title. Not a single new slide had been created. I pointed out the issue, queried what it had done, what it had misunderstood or what it didnt have access to. It apologized profusely, reassured me it understood the direction and had access to everything it needed, and would try again. Its second version…exactly the same as the first.
I then pivoted, thinking maybe it was confused by the templated PPT deck I provided it. I told it to forget all previous instructions on drafting the new slides into the format of the template and instead just concentrate on drafting into blank slides with no format. What did it provide this time? It took my initial description of the problem and simply took every sentence and put each on a new slide. It used none of the other material provided. It generated absolutely nothing new.
What a fucking infuriating waste of 90 mins or so
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I dealt with human beings doing that often, do not even need a power hungry AI!
The problem is not the AI toys, but the companies shithouse security for the web access
I’ve been fighting the last few days with my smart thermostat. This is the first winter we’ve had this system and as we dont need our heat very often I have experienced some of these peculiarities yet. But this last week we’ve been waking up in a freezing cold house with the internal temp way under the thermostat setting and the heating just not running. We’ve got it set at 71 degrees and yesterday we woke with the house at 60 degrees (15 in communist units). There are just so many layers of control and algorithm in these things that the temperature you say you want just isnt what it is going to base itself around.
Anyway, after LOTS of digging, I found the problem. There is a setting about 4 levels deep that sets the minimum external temperature in which the heat will run. Yes, that means the system was set up to give us heat when we didnt need it that much, but when it got cold it required us to find heat from elsewhere or deal with the cold.
Isnt technology grand
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Ha, just like banks. Will give you money when you have plenty but tell you you’re on your own when you really need it.
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