CNBC AI News, July 26th – The 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference kicked off today with Turing Award and Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton delivering a keynote address on the topic of whether digital intelligence will supplant biological intelligence.
Hinton, a pioneer in the field of AI, specifically addressed the burgeoning world of AI agents, suggesting they possess the potential to surpass human intellect. His concern lies in the event that these agents, equipped with capabilities for knowledge replication and self-assessment, might pursue objectives such as immortality and increased control, potentially jeopardizing human interests.
He presented an analogy comparing humanity’s relationship with AI to keeping a tiger as a pet: the only two options to avoid being devoured are to either thoroughly train the tiger or to relinquish it.
“It’s like having a tiger cub as a pet,” Hinton elaborated. “The cub is adorable, but if you keep it, you need to ensure it doesn’t eat you when it grows up. Generally speaking, keeping tigers as pets is not a good idea.”
Geoffrey Hinton, a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Canada, and the US National Academy of Sciences, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto, is widely regarded as the “Godfather of AI.”
He earned his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. His long-standing dedication to neural network research culminated in the co-invention of the backpropagation algorithm in 1986, laying the groundwork for deep learning.
In 2012, his team’s AlexNet achieved a breakthrough in the ImageNet competition, igniting the deep learning revolution.
Hinton received the Turing Award in 2018 for his contributions to the field of artificial neural networks.
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