Rejoice, for the year of 2025 is finally over.
During our planet’s latest and seemingly interminable revolution around the Sun, the tech industry’s obsession with AI soared to ever more implausible heights. CEOs began openly gloating about replacing their underlings with AI “agents.” The phenomenon of so-called AI psychosis became a national news story as more people were seemingly driven over the edge by their silver-tongued chatbot companions. “Slop” took on a new meaning. And the word “circular” suddenly started being used a whole lot in the same sentence as “billions of dollars” or even “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Will 2026 finally deliver us from this endless cavalcade of large language model madness? Not likely, according to computer scientist and “godfather” of AI Geoffrey Hinton. AI will only continue to improve next year, he predicts, reaching a point where it will liberate us from all our horrible low-paying jobs.
“I think we’re going to see AI get even better,” Hinton said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs.”
Hinton was one of three recipients of the prestigious Turing Award in 2018 for his work on neural networks that formed the bedrock of modern AI, earning him the moniker of being a “godfather” of the field.
In 2023, Hinton declared that he regretted his life’s work after stepping down from his role at Google, where he had been for over a decade. Since then, he’s become one of the tech’s most prominent doomsayers.
During the CNN interview, Hinton was asked whether he was more or less worried about AI since making that now infamous declaration.
“I’m probably more worried,” Hinton replied. “It’s progressed even faster than I thought. In particular, it’s got better at doing things like reasoning and also at things like deceiving people.”
AI is progressing so quickly, according to Hinton, that around every seven months it can complete tasks that took twice as long before. He predicted that it’s only a matter of years until an AI will effortlessly perform software engineering tasks that take a human a month to complete.
“And then there’ll be very few people need for software engineering projects,” Hinton added.
Hinton made similarly gloomy predictions in a talk with Senator Bernie Sanders last month, saying that tech leaders are “betting on AI replacing a lot of workers.”
It still remains to be seen, though, if AI will actually make those strides. Many efforts to replace workers with semi-autonomous AI models have failed, while some new models, like OpenAI’s GPT-5, showed only lackluster improvements.
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