Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google so he can speak freely about AI risks
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
On May 1, 2023 The New York Times reported that Geoffrey Hinton, the deep-learning pioneer and Turing Award winner, had quit Google after more than a decade so he could warn about AI’s dangers.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Announced May 1, 2023 via a New York Times interview (Cade Metz)
- Hinton on X: he left ‘so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google’, adding that Google had acted very responsibly
- Concerns: misinformation (people ‘not be able to know what is true anymore’), job losses, and AI becoming smarter than people much sooner than he expected
- On May 3, 2023 he wrote on X that he now predicts 5 to 20 years (for digital intelligence overtaking us), ‘but without much confidence’
What happened
Hinton, whose work on backpropagation and deep belief nets underpins modern AI, left his Google role and began speaking publicly about existential and societal risks. A few weeks later he signed the CAIS statement on AI extinction risk.
Why it matters
When one of the field’s founders publicly switched to warning about it, AI x-risk moved into the mainstream. It paved the way for the 2023 policy wave (CAIS statement, Bletchley) and for Hinton later endorsing whistleblower and safety efforts.
Sources
5 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 1 primary, 4 press
Primary
- Geoffrey Hinton on X: ‘I now predict 5 to 20 years’x.com, official
Press
- MIT Technology Review: Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Googletechnologyreview.com, press
- CNN: AI pioneer quits Google to warn about the technology’s dangerscnn.com, press
- New York Times: ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ leaves Google and warns of danger aheadnytimes.com, press
- MIT Technology Review interview: why Hinton is scared of AItechnologyreview.com, press
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)