Feature‘Mother AI’ Could Be Humanity’s Last Hope, Says Godfather of AI

Trying to maintain control of AI is a futile task. Instead, Geoffrey Hinton, also known as the Godfather of AI, said we need “mother AI.”

Hinton, a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist who spoke at the 2025 Ai4 event in Las Vegas today, claimed AI will quickly develop two sub-goals. One, he said, is to stay alive — because if you can’t stay alive, you can’t achieve your other goals. The other is to get more control, because if you can get more control, you can get more done.

Geoffrey Hinton speaking at the Ai4 event in Las Vegas on August 12, 2025 Simpler Media Group

“They’re just going to be much smarter than us,” he said, adding that he believes AI will surpass human intelligence in 5 to 20 years.

Controlling AI Is Futile, According to Geoffrey Hinton

People have been looking at the human vs. AI scenario all wrong, said Hinton. “People have been saying… we have to stay in control of these AIs. We’ve somehow got to be stronger than that. We’ve got to be dominant and they’ve got to be submissive.”

But that’s not going to work. “They’re going to be much smarter than us. They’re going to have all sorts of ways of getting around that.”

Instead, we need to reframe the problem. We don’t need to be stronger or stay in control. “When they’re more powerful and smarter than us, make it so they still care about us. We need mother AI, AI mothers.”

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We Need ‘AI Mothers,’ Not AI Assistants

Mothers, explained Hinton, have all sorts of built in instincts, hormones and social pressures to genuinely care about their babies. And what we need is AI mothers rather than AI assistants. “An assistant is someone you can fire. You can’t fire your mother, unfortunately.”

This is something we need to think about when we’re making beings, “which is what we’re doing now,” he said. Don’t just think about intelligence — think about the rest of what’s in a being.

If you ask a human mother: do you want to get rid of your maternal instinct? A mother would say no, Hinton claimed, because she cares about the baby and because she doesn’t want it to die.

“We need to build maternal instincts into [AI] so they really care about people. And how would that work? Technically? What do we need to get some kind of mother AI?”

Giving AI a Sense of Self Could Be the Key

According to Hinton, the answer to that question is not one he knows. Instead, it will take a lot of research. “But this isn't research on how to make them smarter. It's research on how to make them more maternal, so they care about us, their babies.”

Emmett Shear, former interim CEO at OpenAI and co-founder of Twitch, agreed. “At some base level, we need the AI to be able to care about us, not just follow our values. It has to care about us and we have to care about it.”

To do this, said Shear, AI needs to develop a sense of self. Because you can’t be a “we” if you’re not an “I.”

This is something Shear and his colleagues are working on with the MetaGrid project — a multi-agent gridworld environment where AI get to experience, over and over again, various challenges and opportunities to compete or collaborate with one another.

“The goal is to get them to learn over time, ‘Oh, this is what it means, what it feels like to be part of a team.’”

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Hinton’s Warning: AI Parenting Is Humanity’s Only Safe Future

Ultimately, said Hinton, this is the one place where he believes we’ll get genuine international collaboration, because all countries want to prevent AI from taking over people.

“Now it will take over in the sense that it'll be more powerful than us. It'll be smarter than us.” Our one chance, Hinton said, is to build AI so that it cares about us.

“AI parenting us — that’s the only good outcome. If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me.”