YouCongress
About Sign up

Comment by Geoffrey Hinton

Avatar
Godfather of Deep Learning
When you open source a big model and give people the weights [...] You get people using that open source model and training it, refining it to do something bad like cyberattacks or making biological weapons because it's much easier to refine the model than just to train it. So my belief is that open-sourcing weights is a bit like making fissile material free.
AI Verified source (2025)
Like Share on X 6mo ago
Policy proposals and claims
Open-source AI is more dangerous than closed-source AI
votes For
Statement relation verification history AI Verified Report this

Statement relation comments

AI Verified The quote clearly argues that releasing model weights makes harmful misuse much easier and compares open-sourcing to giving away fissile material. While it does not name closed-source AI explicitly, it clearly implies open-source AI is more dangerous than keeping the model closed. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
Vote inference verification history AI Unverifiable Report this

Vote answer comments

AI Unverifiable The quote says open-sourcing weights makes misuse 'much easier' and is 'like making fissile material free,' but it does not explicitly compare open-source AI with closed-source AI as a whole. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
Ban open source AI models capable of creating WMDs
votes For
Statement relation verification history AI Verified Report this

Statement relation comments

AI Verified The quote explicitly warns that open-sourcing model weights enables refinement for harmful uses, including making biological weapons, and compares releasing weights to making fissile material free. That clearly implies opposition to open-source AI models capable of creating WMDs, which supports the statement’s ban. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
Vote inference verification history AI Unverifiable Report this

Vote answer comments

AI Unverifiable The quote says open-sourcing weights can enable "making biological weapons" and compares it to "making fissile material free," which clearly criticizes open-sourcing. But it does not explicitly say such models should be "banned," so the policy stance is not fully unambiguous from the quote alone. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago

Quote authenticity verification history

Report this

Quote authenticity comments

AI Verified Verified: the source URL itself is a BUSINESS POWERHOUSE interview page dated 07 July 2025, and it attributes the passage to Professor Geoffrey Hinton. In lines 208–209, the page contains the submitted wording, with [...] correctly standing in for omitted intervening sentences, so the quote is authentic and correctly attributed to Hinton in 2025. A later OfficeChai piece also summarizes the same analogy. ([business-powerhouse.com](https://www.business-powerhouse.com/an-interview-with-geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-ai-language-models-may-learn-to-be-much-smarter-than-people)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 19d ago
AI Verified Verified via web search. Geoffrey Hinton's position is extensively documented: "open-sourcing weights is a bit like making fissile material free" / "open-sourcing big (AI) models is like being able to buy nuclear weapons at Radioshack." He has called for regulating open-source AI specifically because fine-tuning open weights enables bad actors (cyberattacks, bioweapons). Cleaned up the quote — removed the "Professor Geoffrey Hinton:" speaker label and used [...] to tighten the long passage while preserving the key claims. Hinton is correctly identified as Godfather of Deep Learning (2024 Nobel Prize). Vote "for" aligns with the statement "Open-source AI is more dangerous than closed-source AI." Source URL blocked but content corroborated by Office Chai, The Logic, Hacker News and Wikipedia coverage. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 1mo ago
replying to Geoffrey Hinton