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Hinton is too speculative and inconsistent for me. A reporter outside the AI field even called him out for saying with confidence that only blue collar work wil

Hinton is too speculative and inconsistent for me. A reporter outside the AI field even called him out for saying with confidence that only blue collar work will survive AI by pointing out a few years back he said with the same confidence that only creative work will survive. I can't but compare his takes with Stuart Russell takes, which are so well grounded, coherent and easily presented. I often revisit Stuart Russell discussion with Steven Pinker on AI for the clarity he brings to the topic.

treyfitty 1y ago
Eh, idk who Hinton is, but I’d cut him some slack for making both statements- I could imagine a case where “creatives” can semantically be understood as “new blue collar.” Musicians, dancers, photographers… are not blue color manufacturing employees, but they are fiscally more similar than their white collar counterparts. It’s possible he used inconsistent terms because he really means “low-wage employees who are far away from the monetary benefit creation decisions,” but that’s a mouthful
- glitchc 1y ago
  If you don't know who Geoffrey Hinton is, I suggest you make a trip to Wikipedia post haste. Our modern LLM renaissance wouldn't exist without him.
  - nurettin 1y ago
    Ehhh it sounds like he's a poster boy who rode on the success of others (LeCun, Deepmind) and says whatever the current popular opinion is until proven wrong and shows no hint of predictive capability.
    - glitchc 1y ago
      Say what? Show some respect, son! Hinton published the seminal paper on backpropagation. He also invented Boltzmann machines, unsupervised learning and mixture of ecperts models. He championed machine learning for 20 years even though there was zero funding for it through the 80s and 90s. He was Yann LeCun's PhD adviser. That means Yann LeCun didn't know ass from tea kettle until Hinton introduced him to machine learning. Know perchance a fellow by the name of Ilya Sutskever? ChatGPT ring any bells? Also a student of Hinton's. The list is very long.
      - nurettin 1y ago
        Frankly, this all sounds like hero worship and the language is very cringe. I know the backprop paper. I've read it in the early 2000s. And I remember Hinton as a co-author. Same with Boltzmann machines. Co-author. "Advisor to that great guy", "Teacher of this great guy", "Nobel price together with that guy" <- all of this leads me to the above conclusion. YMMV
        qwertytyyuu 1y ago
        Come on there is space for theatrics on hacker news
        polotics 1y ago
        just one example of the halo effect: having been instrumental in the development of an important technology doesn't magically make one an expert in the economic impact of that technology, as economy is a completely different field of study
        sriram_malhar 1y ago
        Frankly, this all sounds like hero worship and the language is very cringe. "Frankly, I just want to be a contrarian"
        nurettin 1y ago
        "Hell hath no fury like a conformist scorned"
        glitchc 1y ago
        I'm not a fanboy, far from it. I'm not affiliated with the lab or his work. I'm not even a big fan of machine learning. But Hinton's contributions to the field cannot be understated. He single-handedly kept it alive for two decades amid a massive lack of funding. Anyone who has worked in research will attest that this is an incredible feat. People on Hacker News seems to idolize the lone genius who somehow pulled himself up from his bootstraps. That person does not exist. The truth is that great minds are made, moulded into shape. That the best people behind our AI technology emerged from his lab is no coincidence. Those trash-talking Hinton on this forum are unlikely to achieve 1/100th of what he has accomplished. “The housecat may mock the tiger,” said the master, “but doing so will not make his purr into a roar.” [1] [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html
- gobdovan 1y ago
  Hinton is the guy from the article. He is a big figure in AI research. For context: he once argued AI could handle complex tasks but not drawing or music. Then when Stable Diffusion appeared, he flipped to "AI is creative." Now he's saying carpentry will be the last job to be automated, so people should learn that. The pattern is sweeping, premature claims about what AI can or can't do that don't age well. His economic framing is similarly simplified to the point of being either trivial or misleading.
  - SanjayMehta 1y ago
    Carpentry is already partially automated. I’ve worked on cutting algorithms to minimise waste. There are a number of startups which will go from a 3D interior design to manufacturing. Think of customised Ikea.
chubot 1y ago
I guess it's worth reminding people that in 2016, Geoff Hinton said some pretty arrogant things that turned out to be totally wrong: Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious. I think if you work as a radiologist, you're like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down It’s just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.… It might be 10 years, but we’ve got plenty of radiologists already.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ This article has some good perspective: https://newrepublic.com/article/187203/ai-radiology-geoffrey-hinton-nobel-prediction https://newrepublic.com/article/187203/ai-radiology-geoffrey... His words were consequential. The late 2010s were filled with articles that professed the end of radiology; I know at least a few people who chose alternative careers because of these predictions. --- According to US News, radiology is the 7th best paying job in 2025, and the demand is rising: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-paying-jobs https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-pay... https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/healthcare-staffing/radiologist-among-americas-best-jobs-2025-us-news-and-world-report-says https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/h... I asked AI about radiologists in 2025, and it came up with this article: https://medicushcs.com/resources/the-radiologist-shortage-addressing-the-gap-between-supply-and-demand https://medicushcs.com/resources/the-radiologist-shortage-ad... The Radiologist Shortage: Rising Demand, Limited Supply, Strategic Response (Ironically, this article feels spammy to me -- AI is probably being too credulous about what's written on the web!) --- I read Cade Metz's book about Hinton and the tech transfer from universities to big tech ... I can respect him for persisting in his line of research for 20-30 years, while others saying he was barking up the wrong tree But maybe this late life vindication led to a chip on his shoulder The way he phrased this is remarkably confident and arrogant, and not like the behavior of respected scientist (now with a Nobel Prize) ... It's almost like Twitter-speak that made its way into real life, and he's obviously not from the generation that grew up with Twitter
- giardini 1y ago
  I wouldn't be too hard on Hinton. Researchers in image processing, geophysics and medicine have been saying the same thing since at least the early 1980's. There was always something coming that was just over the next hill that would take the human out of the loop. That special something always evaporated with time. I suppose it did keep funding coming in.
theologic 1y ago
Hinton's citations is 5x what Russell has. There's a good reason why he's won both the Turing and the Nobel Prize. He is just an incredible researcher. I would make the argument that sometimes when you're an incredibly bright, talented person in terms of understanding problems that many other people simply are incapable of following, you're not the right person to be setting expectations how fast a product may ramp into mainstream society. Russell is much more measured in his statements and much more policy driven. In my mind you need to listen to both and try to figure out where they're coming from.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  >Hinton's citations is 5x what Russell has. Ugh, Scientism at its best (worst?). Do you also back up Watson statements about race? I'm sure you don't, as that's not part of your training. Accomplished researchers can say dumb things too, it happens all the time.
  - aswegs8 1y ago
    Experts are often worse than laymen in predicting macro developments because they are narrowed by their focus and biased towards it. Tetlock's Superforecasting is a great book on this. Some condensed source I found on the topic: https://www.ing.com/Newsroom/News/The-more-famous-an-expert-is-the-less-accurate-their-forecasts-are.htm https://www.ing.com/Newsroom/News/The-more-famous-an-expert-...
    - theologic 1y ago
      I would like to confirm that I've been highly influenced by Tetlock, and I appreciate his work. It was an integral part of a strategy in a business group I was running. With that stated, if you can see beyond his vitriol, Nassim Taleb has some valid comments toward Tetlock's methodologies. I love Taleb, but hate his tendency to try and shock people. However, he does raise valid concerns about fat tails.
  - danaris 1y ago
    And yet, if an accomplished researcher says something and has ample sourcing to back it up, it's worth paying attention to, even if only to be able to effectively refute it. Calling it "scientism" to care about these things as a way of dismissing the argument out of hand is anti-intellectualism at its worst.
Freedom2 1y ago
> too speculative and inconsistent for me. I wonder if he's a HN commenter as well, in that case. I do appreciate your mention of Stuart Russell however. I've recently been watching a few of his talks and have found them very insightful.

treyfitty 1y ago

Eh, idk who Hinton is, but I’d cut him some slack for making both statements- I could imagine a case where “creatives” can semantically be understood as “new blue collar.” Musicians, dancers, photographers… are not blue color manufacturing employees, but they are fiscally more similar than their white collar counterparts. It’s possible he used inconsistent terms because he really means “low-wage employees who are far away from the monetary benefit creation decisions,” but that’s a mouthful

glitchc 1y ago
If you don't know who Geoffrey Hinton is, I suggest you make a trip to Wikipedia post haste. Our modern LLM renaissance wouldn't exist without him.
- nurettin 1y ago
  Ehhh it sounds like he's a poster boy who rode on the success of others (LeCun, Deepmind) and says whatever the current popular opinion is until proven wrong and shows no hint of predictive capability.
  - glitchc 1y ago
    Say what? Show some respect, son! Hinton published the seminal paper on backpropagation. He also invented Boltzmann machines, unsupervised learning and mixture of ecperts models. He championed machine learning for 20 years even though there was zero funding for it through the 80s and 90s. He was Yann LeCun's PhD adviser. That means Yann LeCun didn't know ass from tea kettle until Hinton introduced him to machine learning. Know perchance a fellow by the name of Ilya Sutskever? ChatGPT ring any bells? Also a student of Hinton's. The list is very long.
    - nurettin 1y ago
      Frankly, this all sounds like hero worship and the language is very cringe. I know the backprop paper. I've read it in the early 2000s. And I remember Hinton as a co-author. Same with Boltzmann machines. Co-author. "Advisor to that great guy", "Teacher of this great guy", "Nobel price together with that guy" <- all of this leads me to the above conclusion. YMMV
      - qwertytyyuu 1y ago
        Come on there is space for theatrics on hacker news
      - polotics 1y ago
        just one example of the halo effect: having been instrumental in the development of an important technology doesn't magically make one an expert in the economic impact of that technology, as economy is a completely different field of study
      - sriram_malhar 1y ago
        Frankly, this all sounds like hero worship and the language is very cringe. "Frankly, I just want to be a contrarian"
        nurettin 1y ago
        "Hell hath no fury like a conformist scorned"
      - glitchc 1y ago
        I'm not a fanboy, far from it. I'm not affiliated with the lab or his work. I'm not even a big fan of machine learning. But Hinton's contributions to the field cannot be understated. He single-handedly kept it alive for two decades amid a massive lack of funding. Anyone who has worked in research will attest that this is an incredible feat. People on Hacker News seems to idolize the lone genius who somehow pulled himself up from his bootstraps. That person does not exist. The truth is that great minds are made, moulded into shape. That the best people behind our AI technology emerged from his lab is no coincidence. Those trash-talking Hinton on this forum are unlikely to achieve 1/100th of what he has accomplished. “The housecat may mock the tiger,” said the master, “but doing so will not make his purr into a roar.” [1] [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html
gobdovan 1y ago
Hinton is the guy from the article. He is a big figure in AI research. For context: he once argued AI could handle complex tasks but not drawing or music. Then when Stable Diffusion appeared, he flipped to "AI is creative." Now he's saying carpentry will be the last job to be automated, so people should learn that. The pattern is sweeping, premature claims about what AI can or can't do that don't age well. His economic framing is similarly simplified to the point of being either trivial or misleading.
- SanjayMehta 1y ago
  Carpentry is already partially automated. I’ve worked on cutting algorithms to minimise waste. There are a number of startups which will go from a 3D interior design to manufacturing. Think of customised Ikea.

chubot 1y ago

I guess it's worth reminding people that in 2016, Geoff Hinton said some pretty arrogant things that turned out to be totally wrong: Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious. I think if you work as a radiologist, you're like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down It’s just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.… It might be 10 years, but we’ve got plenty of radiologists already.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ This article has some good perspective: https://newrepublic.com/article/187203/ai-radiology-geoffrey-hinton-nobel-prediction https://newrepublic.com/article/187203/ai-radiology-geoffrey... His words were consequential. The late 2010s were filled with articles that professed the end of radiology; I know at least a few people who chose alternative careers because of these predictions. --- According to US News, radiology is the 7th best paying job in 2025, and the demand is rising: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-paying-jobs https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-pay... https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/healthcare-staffing/radiologist-among-americas-best-jobs-2025-us-news-and-world-report-says https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/h... I asked AI about radiologists in 2025, and it came up with this article: https://medicushcs.com/resources/the-radiologist-shortage-addressing-the-gap-between-supply-and-demand https://medicushcs.com/resources/the-radiologist-shortage-ad... The Radiologist Shortage: Rising Demand, Limited Supply, Strategic Response (Ironically, this article feels spammy to me -- AI is probably being too credulous about what's written on the web!) --- I read Cade Metz's book about Hinton and the tech transfer from universities to big tech ... I can respect him for persisting in his line of research for 20-30 years, while others saying he was barking up the wrong tree But maybe this late life vindication led to a chip on his shoulder The way he phrased this is remarkably confident and arrogant, and not like the behavior of respected scientist (now with a Nobel Prize) ... It's almost like Twitter-speak that made its way into real life, and he's obviously not from the generation that grew up with Twitter

giardini 1y ago
I wouldn't be too hard on Hinton. Researchers in image processing, geophysics and medicine have been saying the same thing since at least the early 1980's. There was always something coming that was just over the next hill that would take the human out of the loop. That special something always evaporated with time. I suppose it did keep funding coming in.

theologic 1y ago

Hinton's citations is 5x what Russell has. There's a good reason why he's won both the Turing and the Nobel Prize. He is just an incredible researcher. I would make the argument that sometimes when you're an incredibly bright, talented person in terms of understanding problems that many other people simply are incapable of following, you're not the right person to be setting expectations how fast a product may ramp into mainstream society. Russell is much more measured in his statements and much more policy driven. In my mind you need to listen to both and try to figure out where they're coming from.

moralestapia 1y ago
>Hinton's citations is 5x what Russell has. Ugh, Scientism at its best (worst?). Do you also back up Watson statements about race? I'm sure you don't, as that's not part of your training. Accomplished researchers can say dumb things too, it happens all the time.
- aswegs8 1y ago
  Experts are often worse than laymen in predicting macro developments because they are narrowed by their focus and biased towards it. Tetlock's Superforecasting is a great book on this. Some condensed source I found on the topic: https://www.ing.com/Newsroom/News/The-more-famous-an-expert-is-the-less-accurate-their-forecasts-are.htm https://www.ing.com/Newsroom/News/The-more-famous-an-expert-...
  - theologic 1y ago
    I would like to confirm that I've been highly influenced by Tetlock, and I appreciate his work. It was an integral part of a strategy in a business group I was running. With that stated, if you can see beyond his vitriol, Nassim Taleb has some valid comments toward Tetlock's methodologies. I love Taleb, but hate his tendency to try and shock people. However, he does raise valid concerns about fat tails.
- danaris 1y ago
  And yet, if an accomplished researcher says something and has ample sourcing to back it up, it's worth paying attention to, even if only to be able to effectively refute it. Calling it "scientism" to care about these things as a way of dismissing the argument out of hand is anti-intellectualism at its worst.

Freedom2 1y ago

> too speculative and inconsistent for me. I wonder if he's a HN commenter as well, in that case. I do appreciate your mention of Stuart Russell however. I've recently been watching a few of his talks and have found them very insightful.