By Geoffrey Hinton
Publication Date: 2025-12-11 12:46:00
Artificial intelligence is the most influential technological development of our time – more influential than computers or the Internet and perhaps comparable to the Industrial Revolution, but occurring on a much faster timescale.
I believe 2025 will be a pivotal year in the history of AI for three main reasons: remarkable advances in AI capabilities in areas such as image and video generation, mathematics and software development; unprecedented levels of investment; and a growing awareness that the enormous benefits of AI can come with enormous problems.
First, it is important to understand exactly what AI is. In the past, computer systems could not understand natural language. Now they do it, and they do it the same way humans do: They convert words into sets of features that capture the words’ meanings, and use learned interactions between those features to refine the word meanings until they fit well together.
Large AI systems already know thousands of times how…