Will AI outsmart human intelligence? - with 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN readers recommend it as an intuitive explanation of neural networks that shifts how people think about AI and language.
What it is
Geoffrey Hinton's 2025 Royal Institution Discourse on what AI has learned from biological intelligence and how it might surpass it. He explains neural networks and argues that human language use resembles what backpropagation-trained networks do.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2025 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec j1mr10rd4n · 2025-11 · on “The Case That A.I. Is Thinking”
Geoffrey Hinton's recent lecture at the Royal Institute[1] is a fascinating watch. His assertion that human use of language being exactly analogous to neural networks with back-propagation really made me think about what LLMs might be able to do, and indeed, what happens in me when I "think". A common objection to LLM "intelligence" is that "they don't know anything". But in turn... what do biological intelligences "know"? For example, I "know" how to do things like write constructs that make complex collections of programmable switches behave in certain ways, but what do I really "understand"? I've been "taught" things about quantum mechanics, electrons, semiconductors, transistors, integra
Recommends calf · 2025-08 · on “Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens”
It was a Royal Institution public lecture, "Will AI outsmart human intelligence? - with 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton", [this video] Ultimately I somehwat disagreed with some of Hintons points in this talk, and after some thought I came up with specific reasons/doubts, and yet at the same time, his intuitive explanations helped shift my views somewhat as well.
Recommends tim333 · 2025-10 · on “YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started”
I muck about on HN and get ~80% of my video content on youtube. I think it's great overall. The rest ~5% twitter, 0% TV although I have one sitting switched off with a £174 bbc fee. 5% pirated maybe. If you go with the official HN guide of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" and avoid "stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities" then youtube is much better - watching Hinton explain AI and neural networks at the mo. [LINK] and [this video] which is kind of interesting.