Noah Berger/Associated Press
- The "Godfather of AI" outlined why he thinks Google moved slower on rolling out its chatbots.Geoffrey Hinton, who spent more than a decade at Google, said reputational considerations were key.Hinton, who focuses on AI safety, said he couldn't comment on if Sam Altman has a "good moral compass."
When it comes to winning the AI race, the "Godfather of AI" thinks there's an advantage in having nothing to lose.
On an episode of the "Diary of a CEO" podcast that aired June 16, Geoffrey Hinton laid out what he sees as a key difference between how OpenAI and Google, his former employer, dealt with AI safety.
"When they had these big chatbots, they didn't release them, possibly because they were worried about their reputation," Hinton said of Google. "They had a very good reputation, and they didn't want to damage it."
Google released Bard, its AI chatbot, in March of 2023, before later incorporating it into its larger suite of large language models called Gemini. The company was playing catch-up, though, since OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022.
Hinton, who earned his nickname for his pioneering work on neural networks, laid out a key reason that OpenAI could move faster on the podcast episode: "OpenAI didn't have a reputation, and so they could afford to take the gamble."
Talking at an all-hands meeting shortly after ChatGPT came out, Google's then-head of AI said the company didn't plan to immediately release a chatbot because of "reputational risk," adding that it needed to make choices "more conservatively than a small startup," CNBC reported at the time.
The company's AI boss, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, said in February of this year that AI poses potential long-term risks, and that agentic systems could get "out of control." He advocated having a governing body that regulates AI projects.
Gemini has made some high-profile mistakes since its launch, and showed bias in its written responses and image-generating feature. Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the controversy in a memo to staff last year, saying the company "got it wrong" and pledging to make changes.
The "Godfather" saw Google's early chatbot decision-making from the inside — he spent more than a decade at the company before quitting to talk more freely about what he describes as the dangers of AI. On Monday's podcast episode, though, Hinton said he didn't face internal pressure to stay silent.
"Google encouraged me to stay and work on AI safety, and said I could do whatever I liked on AI safety," he said. "You kind of censor yourself. If you work for a big company, you don't feel right saying things that will damage the big company."
Overall, Hinton said he thinks Google "actually behaved very responsibly."
Hinton couldn't be as sure about OpenAI, though he has never worked at the company. When asked whether the company's CEO, Sam Altman, has a "good moral compass" earlier in the episode, he said, "We'll see." He added that he doesn't know Altman personally, so he didn't want to comment further.
OpenAI has faced criticism in recent months for approaching safety differently than in the past. In a recent blog post, the company said it would only change its safety requirements after making sure it wouldn't "meaningfully increase the overall risk of severe harm." Its focus areas for safety now include cybersecurity, chemical threats, and AI's power to improve independently.
Altman defended OpenAI's approach to safety in an interview at TED2025 in April, saying that the company's preparedness framework outlines "where we think the most important danger moments are." Altman also acknowledged in the interview that OpenAI has loosened some restrictions on its model's behavior based on user feedback about censorship.
The earlier competition between OpenAI and Google to release initial chatbots was fierce, and the AI talent race is only heating up. Documents reviewed by Business Insider reveal that Google relied on ChatGPT in 2023 — during its attempts to catch up to ChatGPT.
Representatives for Google and OpenAI did not respond to BI's request for comment.
