'Godfather of AI' reveals who he really thinks will win the AI race

It's man versus machine, as the great artificial intelligence race continues to heat up.

The question is, are we heading toward some happy Big Hero 6-inspired future where robots protect us, or was James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day vision of an apocalyptic future with rogue robots really on the money?

If you ask 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton, only one side is destined to come out on top of this one.

While AI has been around since John McCarthy coined the term as part of a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956, we've seen a real boom of AI coming out of the realms of science fiction and into our lives in the past few years. You can thank ChatGPT, Grok, and the others for that, but alongside ideas that processes can be streamlined and money can be saved, there are the more immediate fears that jobs will be lost and even that lives could be at risk.

It's not a case of whether mankind will triumph, but which tech giant will come out as the de facto winner.

Speaking to Business Insider, Hinton says that he thinks it's about time Alphabet/Google lived up to its reputation of dominating the internet and really took a leap forward with AI.

Discussing the future of the industry, the Godfather of AI, who'd previously worked for Google Brain, explained: "I think it's actually more surprising than it's taken this long for Google to overtake OpenAI."

Having just launched Gemini 3 in November 2025 and the Nano Banana Pro AI image model, some have already said that the former sees Google overtake OpenAI's GPT-5.

It's a big turnaround from a supposed 'code red' that faced Google when ChatGPT was released in November 2022. On the flip side, Hinton suggests it's now OpenAI that's sounding the same alarm: "I think that right now they're beginning to overtake it."

If this wasn't enough, Google now has the 'big advantage' of potentially making its own chips thanks to a billion-dollar deal to supply Meta with its own tech.

Looking even further ahead, Hinton gushed: "Google has a lot of very good researchers and obviously a lot of data and a lot of data centers. My guess is Google will win."

Things have seemingly come a long way from his time at Google Brain, with Hinton saying that while AI was once at the forefront, it was held back: "Google was in the lead for a long time, right? Google invented transformers. Google had big chatbots before other people."

Although Hinton left Google in 2023 due to his concerns about where AI was heading, he still has plenty of praise for the tech giant and went on to reveal why its own chatbot was kept in the wings in the aftermath of Microsoft's short-lived Tay which posted racist tweets: "Google, obviously, had a very good reputation and was worried about damaging it like that."

There have been a couple of stumbles, like an AI image generator being 'too woke' and AI advising you to put glue on pizza to stop the cheese from falling off, but on the whole, Google gets Hinton's vote when it comes to who will come out victorious from the AI wars. Sorry, it doesn't look like it's us mere fleshy humans.