Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton said that “regulation is a steering wheel, not a brake” during a lecture at the O’Connor Centre for Learning on 23 June 2026. Hinton discussed the promise and perils of artificial intelligence in his talk ‘Are We Creating Alien Beings?’, reflecting on the potential dangers of increasingly capable AI systems and the need for robust safety research and international cooperation. He questioned whether current training approaches, such as human reinforcement learning, were sufficient, comparing them to a “polite veneer” that masks deeper structural issues. To address risks, Hinton pointed to the importance of international collaboration on safety research, comparing potential cooperation to the United States and the Soviet Union cooperating during the Cold War to prevent nuclear war. He also said the public had a role to play in strengthening governance frameworks, stating, “It's very dangerous technology. It's already causing many different kinds of harm, and the main thing we can do is get the public to understand what's going on and the public to insist the politicians make regulations.” Hinton also challenged the view that large language models are merely sophisticated autocomplete systems, arguing they generate responses through learned representations of meaning.