The “Godfather of AI” believes it’s time for Google to join the AI race.
“I think it’s actually more surprising than it’s taken this long for Google to overtake OpenAI,” University of Toronto professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, a former employee of Google Brain, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Google recently released Gemini 3, a highly acclaimed version that some tech insiders said pushed the behemoth beyond OpenAI’s GPT-5. Another successful AI image model is Google’s Nano Banana Pro.
According to recent sources, OpenAI has begun sounding the alarm three years after Google allegedly issued a “code red” following the introduction of ChatGPT.
Hinton stated, “I think that right now they’re beginning to overtake it,” about Google’s standing in relation to OpenAI.
On top of the successful debut of its latest AI model, Google shares jumped on speculations that it may arrange a billion-dollar agreement to provide Meta with its own AI processors.
According to Hinton, Google has a “big advantage” in producing its own semiconductors.
He stated that Google has a large number of excellent researchers as well as a large amount of data and data centers. “My guess is Google will win.”
According to Hinton, who contributed to the development of AI research while working at Google Brain, the search engine behemoth was once at the forefront of AI but withheld it.
“Google was in the lead for a long time, right?” he said. “Transformers were created by Google. Before anybody else, Google had big chatbots.
Following Microsoft’s catastrophic 2016 introduction of its short-lived “Tay” AI chatbot, which it put offline after it wrote extremely racist tweets, Google was wary, according to Hinton.
“Google, obviously, had a very good reputation and was worried about damaging it like that,” he explained.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has previously stated that the business delayed deploying its chatbot.
Earlier this year, Pichai stated, “We hadn’t quite reached a point where you could put it out and people would have been okay with Google putting out that product.” “It still had a lot of issues at that time.”
The firm has had several unreliable rollouts in the past. Google had to halt their AI image generator just a year ago due to user complaints that results displaying historically incorrect depictions of people of color were too “woke.” Its first AI search overviews included absurd suggestions, such applying glue to pizza to keep the cheese from slipping off.
In Hinton’s honor, Google recently donated a significant grant to the institution
Prior to the news that Google will contribute $10 million CAD to support the creation of the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto, Hinton gave a speech. Hinton divided his time between Google and the university, which promised to match Google’s gift.
In 2023, Hinton quit Google because of worries about the advancement of AI. Since then, he has frequently discussed the dangers AI poses to civilization, from the possibility of outsmarting humans to the potential for job displacement. Hinton shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
According to a statement from Google, Geoff’s work on neural networks during his ten years at Google and his time in academia provided the groundwork for modern AI. This chair celebrates his memory and will assist the institution in recruiting innovative academics committed to the same type of curiosity-driven, fundamental research that Geoff advocated.
