#LiveStream: Vienna Gödel Lecture 2026 with Geoffrey Hinton
On October 23, we have the great honor of welcoming Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton as this year’s speaker for the Vienna Gödel Lecture.

October 23rd 2026 Friday
- 17:00 – 18:30 CEST / Add to calendar
Join us for this year’s Gödel Lecture with Nobel laureate and ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton!
A pioneer in Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning, Geoffrey Hinton’s research has profoundly shaped today’s AI systems. In 2024, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Live Stream
- tuwien.zoom.us/j/69631524316
- Meeting-ID: 69631524316
- Passcode: Cxyarhs4
Is AI Like us and will it like us?
At this year’s Gödel Lecture, Geoffrey Hinton will give a brief and biased history of AI and then present a way of visualizing roughly what happens when an AI understands a sentence. It is very unlike translating into some special internal language and much more like folding a protein. He’ll argue that current AIs understand natural language in pretty much the same way as we do, claim that most people have a completely wrong theory of what subjective experience is, and that there is no reason why AIs cannot have subjective experiences.
Given that chatbots understand language in much the same way we do, can have subjective experience in much the same way we do, already know much more than any one person - and will soon be much smarter than us - he will discuss some of the risks of releasing AI agents that were designed to maximize profits. He will also describe a way of reframing the problem of how we can coexist with superintelligent AI.