Vienna Gödel Lecture 2026: Geoffrey Hinton

The lecture is titled “Is AI Like Us and Will It Like Us?”. Hinton opens with “a very brief and very biased history of AI” and traces today’s chatbots to the tiny language model he trained in 1985, which learned to turn words into features by predicting the next word. His picture of understanding is that words are like LEGO blocks with thousands of dimensions, whose shapes bend to fit the context. Each has hands and gloves that have to lock together; he calls that multi-headed attention, and admits the picture is deliberately not quite right. So understanding a sentence is closer to folding a protein than to translating it into logic. He answers Chomsky’s dismissal with a model car: you understand nothing about cars, the objection goes, until you can explain why none has five wheels. The middle of the talk turns to mortal computation. Analog hardware is cheap and low-power, but its knowledge dies with it. Digital copies sharing gradients exchange billions of times more information than people talking at perhaps 10 bits a second, which leads him to call digital intelligence possibly a better form of intelligence, and to say we should never have released open-weight models. On risk, he puts the chance that AI destroys us at 10 to 20%. He compares us to the owner of a tiger cub and thinks staying in control of something smarter is close to hopeless. Instead, he proposes building AIs that care for us the way a mother cares for her baby. Nations, he argues, can collaborate on that even while they compete to make AI smarter. The last part argues there is no inner theater. A “subjective experience of” pink elephants describes a hypothetical world, not qualia in the mind, and on that account a chatbot with a prism in front of its camera can have one. A Q&A follows.