“A lot of the headlines have been saying that I think it should be stopped now—and I’ve never said that,” he says. “First of all, I don’t think that’s possible, and I think we should continue to develop it because it could do wonderful things. But we should put equal effort into mitigating or preventing the possible bad consequences.”

Hinton says he didn’t leave Google to protest its handling of this new form of AI. In fact, he says, the company moved relatively cautiously despite having a lead in the area. Researchers at Google…