Newly minted Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton says he's proud that one of his former students had a part to play in Sam Altman's brief ouster from O

The Nobel Prize-winning 'godfather of AI' says he's glad one of his students had a hand in ousting Sam Altman from OpenAI

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-09 17:00:06

Newly minted Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton says he's proud that one of his former students had a part to play in Sam Altman's brief ouster from OpenAI in November.

Hinton, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday, was speaking at a press conference on the same day when he weighed in on Altman and OpenAI.

"I'm particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman," Hinton said, referencing his protégé and OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

Sutskever graduated with his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto in 2013. Hinton was Sutskever's doctoral supervisor.

"So OpenAI was set up with a big emphasis on safety. Its primary objective was to develop artificial general intelligence and ensure that it was safe," Hinton said on Tuesday.

"And over time, it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that's unfortunate," he added.