First reactions. Telephone interview, October 2024

“How could I be sure it wasn’t a spoof call?”

2024 physics laureate Geoffrey Hinton received the phone call from Stockholm in the early hours in a hotel room in California, and multiple Swedish accents helped reassure him that his Nobel Prize in Physics was real. In this interview recorded just after he found out about the prize, he talks about the state of machine learning, the pressing need for safety research, and his hopes that the award might make people take the fears he voices more seriously.

Interview transcript

Geoffrey Hinton: Hello?

Adam Smith: Oh, hello. Am I speaking with Geoffrey Hinton?

GH: You are.

AS: This is Adam Smith calling from the website of the Nobel Prize.

GH: Okay. I know who you are ’cause a long time ago I noticed that they have somebody who calls up to get people’s reactions.

AS: Exactly. So could we talk for just a few minutes?

GH: Yes.

AS: Thank you very much indeed. First of all, of course. Many congratulations.

GH: Thank you.

AS: And, where are you? Where did, where did the news reach you?

GH: I’m in a cheap hotel in California, without an internet connection, and with a not very good phone line, phone connection. And I was planning to get an MRI scan today, but I guess I’ll have to cancel that. I had no idea I’d even been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. I was extremely surprised.

AS: It sounds like, quite a sensible place to receive the news in a way. Because you’re a little bit isolated. You can collect your thoughts before, before the deluge of the day.

GH: Yes. On the other hand, it’s two o’clock in the morning.

AS: Oh, goodness. Yes. I’m sorry. Yes. Uh oh dear. I don’t know if you’ve got …

GH: I think it’s three o’clock by now.

AS: … I don’t know if you’ve got the sang froid to go back to bed or whether you just have to accept that the day is going to be a long one.

GH: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve got that much sang froid. 

AS: Well, an utter surprise. What, what were your first thoughts?

GH: My very first thought was how could I be sure it wasn’t a spoof call.

AS: And? How could you?

GH: It was coming from Sweden and the person had a strong Swedish accent and there were several of them.

AS: Yes. So it would have to be a posse of impersonators, which is unlikely, I suppose.

GH: Yes. 

AS: How would you describe yourself? Would you say you were a computer scientist or would you say you were a physicist trying to understand biology when you were doing this work?

GH: I would say I am someone who doesn’t really know what field he’s in but would like to understand how the brain works. And in my attempts to understand how the brain works, I’ve helped to create a technology that works surprisingly well.

AS: It’s notable, I suppose that you’ve very publicly expressed fears about what the technology can bring. What do you think needs to be done in order to allay the fears that you and others are expressing?

GH: So I think it’s rather different from climate change. With climate change, everybody knows what needs to be done. We need to stop burning carbon. It’s just a question of the political will to do that. And large companies making big profits not being willing to do that. But it’s clear what you need to do. Here we’re dealing with something where we have much less idea of what’s going to happen and what to do about it. And so, I wish I had a sort of simple recipe that if you do this, everything’s going to be okay. But I don’t. In particular with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over, I think we’re a kind of bifurcation point in history where in the next few years we need to figure out if there’s a way to deal with that threat. So, I think it’s very important right now for people to be working on the issue of how will we keep control? We need to put a lot of research effort into it. I think one thing governments can do is force the big companies to spend a lot more of their resources on safety research. So that, for example, companies like OpenAI can’t just put safety research on the back burner.

AS: Is there a parallel with the biotechnology revolution when, the bio technologies themselves got together in those Asilomar conferences and sat down and said, you know, there is potential danger here and we need to, we need to be on it ourselves?

GH: Yes. I think there are similarities with that, and I think what they did was very good. Unfortunately there’s many more practical applications of AI. And for the things like cloning that the biologists were trying to keep under control. And so, I think it’s going to be a lot harder. But I think the biologists, what they did is, a good model to look at. It’s impressive that they managed to achieve agreement, and the scientists did it.

AS: So, for instance with the large language models, the thing that I suppose contributes to your fear is you feel that these models are much closer to understanding than a lot of people say. When it comes to the impact of the Nobel Prize in this area, do you think it will make a difference?

GH: Yes, I think it will make a difference. Hopefully it’ll make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying.

AS: Do you worry that people don’t take you seriously?

GH: So there is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks that it’s complete nonsense to say these things understand, that they don’t process language at all in the same way as we do. I think that school is wrong. I think it’s clear now that neural nets are much better at processing language than anything ever produced by the Chomsky School of Linguistics. But there’s still a lot of debate about that, particularly among linguists.

AS: I just wanted to come back though, to the circumstances of you receiving this news, in your hotel room, in the middle of the night. In some ways, a rather lonely place to hear the news. No one to turn to, to sort of hug and celebrate.

GH: Well, I’m here with my partner. I’m here with my partner and she’s quite excited.

AS: Okay. Yes, indeed. But for now, many, many congratulations.

GH: Thank you. Okay.

AS: Bye.

GH: Bye. 

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