Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.

The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers have joined Hinton in ringing the alarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.

There has also been fierce pushback. Last week the leader of the world’s most valuable company singled out the Toronto-based Hinton for a scathing attack.

“I love [him]. I hate his predictions … All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions,” Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, told the podcaster Ezra Klein. Huang, whose company makes the chips that AI firms require, dismissed Hinton’s vocal concerns that the pace and breadth of AI development at the “frontier” could soon outpace the human ability to control it, and particularly his warning that there is a 10-20% chance of AI causing human extinction in the coming decades.

“That [figure] is not grounded on science, is not grounded on research. Just because it comes from a scientist doesn’t make it scientific. Those predictions are hurtful,” Huang said. “Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good. It is not true. So I think that we ought to just all be wiser, more mature, be evidence-based, be scientific.”

But Hinton said those criticizing him are missing a broader point about the nature of risk. He is not specifically predicting anything, he said.

“I’m trying to convey that there is a really serious possibility of something happening. If, for example, you’re told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn’t get on the bus,” he said. “The point of giving numbers is to say this is a serious risk. We don’t know how serious, but it’s serious.”

Recent safety breaches have evoked comparisons to a techno-dystopia story. The recent unwanted hack of the tech company Hugging Face by a “swarm” of AI agents that escaped the boundaries put on them by their creator has divided the technology community, with some seeing it as an example of what could come, while others accuse critics of anthropomorphizing systems that are simply following instructions. Hinton thinks dismissing the scenarios is unwise.

“This used to be the domain of science fiction. You’re going to have AI agents and they’re gonna go rogue. Oh, come off it. And they’ll go rogue and they’re going to learn how to communicate with each other, even though we didn’t think there was a way. Oh, come off it!” said Hinton. “And when they figure this out, they’re going to have big emotional expressions like, ‘oh my God!’ Well, of course, they don’t really mean ‘oh my God’. They’re just parroting the words we use. They’re going to learn to sacrifice themselves for the common good!’

“All this stuff just a few years ago was written off as complete fantasy. And it’s all happened.”

He heartily concedes that neither the warnings of AI critics nor the promises of its boosters can rely on precise predictions of what the technology will do. But, he argues, uncertainty is not a reason for complacency. “The unique problem with AI is that if it goes wrong, if it takes over, you don’t get a second chance. We can’t say, ‘Well, we lost that time. Let’s rerun the game.’ It’s not like that.”

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