AI race winner will be Google: Geoffrey Hinton
Google is on the verge of beating out OpenAI in artificial intelligence, one of the field’s most prominent researchers says. He recently told Business Insider about that idea.
Hinton said it came as something of a shock that Google emerged now, after all this time. [See: Google’s new AI model Gemini-3 and its advanced image generator Nano Banana Pro have injected the company with vitality.
The size of the research team, along with the huge amount of data and Google’s own AI chip are major advantages for Google, he said. Both of these advantages, Hinton suggested, have helped Google get out in front with the competition.
Google has also been somewhat conservative in the past, having learned from the missteps of many other companies, Hinton added. The company was afraid of sullying its reputation, so it would often drag its heels on releasing new products. He used as an example a Google image generator that had to be shut down last year because it provided incorrect images.
Google itself declared ‘Code Red’ after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched a couple of years ago,” outlines the report. Now, in a spasm of anxiety about tech power, the concerns have flipped and Google’s advance is at issue inside OpenAI.
Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google in 2023 to speak out about the dangers AI poses. In 2024 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on AI.
By contrast Google has ponied up $10 million Cdn to create an AI chair at the University of Toronto in Hinton’s name.
