The “Godfather of AI” thinks it’s about time that Google caught up in the AI race.
“I think it’s actually more surprising than it’s taken this long for Google to overtake OpenAI,” Geoffrey Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who previously worked at Google Brain, told Business Insider in a Tuesday interview.
Google is coming off the heels of its widely praised launch of Gemini 3, an update that some in tech said elevated the giant beyond OpenAI’s GPT-5. Google’s Nano Banana Pro AI image model has also proven to be a hit.
Three years after Google reportedly declared a “code red” after the release of ChatGPT, recent reports indicate it’s now OpenAI that is sounding the alarm.
“I think that right now they’re beginning to overtake it,” Hinton said of Google’s position relative to OpenAI.
On top of the successful launch of its latest AI model, shares of Google rose on reports that it might broker a billion-dollar deal to supply Meta with its own AI chips.
Making its own chips is a “big advantage” to Google, Hinton said.
“Google has a lot of very good researchers and obviously a lot of data and a lot of data centers,” he said. “My guess is Google will win.”
Hinton, who helped pioneer AI research during his time at Google Brain, said that the search giant was once at the forefront of AI but held back.
“Google was in the lead for a long time, right?” he said. “Google invented transformers. Google had big chatbots before other people.”
Google was cautious, Hinton said, in the wake of Microsoft’s disastrous 2016 launch of its short-lived “Tay” AI chatbot, which it took offline after it posted incredibly racist tweets.
“Google, obviously, had a very good reputation and was worried about damaging it like that,” he said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has previously said that the company held back on releasing its chatbot.
“We hadn’t quite gotten it to a level where you could put it out and people would’ve been okay with Google putting out that product,” Pichai said earlier this year. “It still had a lot of issues at that time.”
In the past, the company has had some shaky rollouts. Just last year, Google had to pause its AI image generator after some users complained that results showing historically inaccurate images of people of color were too “woke.” Its initial AI search overviews generated nonsensical advice, such as putting glue on pizza to prevent cheese from falling off.
Google just made a big university donation in Hinton’s honor
Hinton spoke to Business Insider ahead of the announcement that Google was donating $10 million CAD to help establish the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto. The university, where Hinton split his time while at Google, said it would match Google’s gift.
Hinton left Google in 2023, citing concerns about AI’s development. Since then, he has repeatedly spoken out about the risks that AI poses to society, ranging from the potential to outsmart humans to displacing jobs. In 2024, Hinton was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.
“Geoff’s work on neural networks — spanning his time in academia and his decade here at Google — laid the foundation for modern AI,” Google said in a statement. “This chair honors his legacy and will help the university recruit visionary scholars dedicated to the same kind of curiosity-driven, fundamental research that Geoff championed.”
