‘Godfather of AI’ warns of mass unemployment: Tech firms are ‘betting on AI replacing a lot of workers’

“Will AI take my job? is one of the most searched career questions globally. Silicon Valley’s most prominent voices have been racing to answer it, and their predictions keep growing bolder. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes the technology will reach into every job that exists and could even bring in a four-day workweek. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has gone further, saying humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” while Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk has predicted that most people won’t need to work at all within “less than 20 years.”

Now Geoffrey Hinton, the British computer scientist known the world over as the “Godfather of AI,” has entered the conversation with the starkest prediction yet. Opinion remains split on whether AI will wipe out jobs entirely or simply reshape how people do them, but Hinton has come down decisively on the darker side: a disruption large enough, he warns, to leave millions without work.

“Massive Unemployment Caused By AI”

In a discussion with Senator Bernie Sanders at Georgetown University, Hinton did not soften his language. “It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by AI,” he said.

He went on to spell out the financial logic he believes is driving it. “And if you ask where are these guys going to get the roughly trillion dollars they’re investing in data centers and chips…one of the main sources of money is going to be by selling people AI that will do the work of workers much cheaper,” he said. “And so these guys are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers.”

This isn’t the first time Hinton has taken aim at Big Tech’s motives. Speaking to Fortune earlier, he argued that the industry’s direction has less to do with genuine scientific progress and more to do with chasing short-term profit – a dynamic, he said, that is actively pushing companies to swap out human employees for AI. That critique lands at a moment when the AI industry’s own finances are under growing examination: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, isn’t expected to turn a profit before 2030, and HSBC estimated in November 2025 that it may need more than $207 billion just to keep expanding.

“It’s A Bit Like When You Drive In Fog”

Hinton left his job at Google in 2023 precisely so he could speak openly about the risks he sees in the technology, and last year the Nobel Prize recognised the machine-learning research that built his reputation in the first place. He isn’t claiming AI will generate no new jobs at all – only that whatever it creates will fall well short of what it eliminates. Still, he was careful to note that even his own predictions shouldn’t be taken as certainty.

“Trying to predict the future of it is going to be very difficult,” he told Sanders. “It’s a bit like when you drive in fog. You can see clearly for 100 yards and at 200 yards you can see nothing. Well, we can see clearly for a year or two, but 10 years out, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

Sanders: Nearly 100 Million Jobs At Risk

Sanders has attached a number to the warning. A report he put out in October 2025, drawing partly on estimates generated by ChatGPT itself, projected that close to 100 million jobs in the US could vanish because of automation – a list that runs from fast food and customer service through to accounting, software development and nursing.

“It’s not just economics,” he wrote in an op-ed for Fox News. “Work, whether being a janitor or a brain surgeon, is an integral part of being human. What happens when that vital aspect of human existence is removed from our lives?”

Senator Mark Warner has raised a related concern, warning that young people entering the workforce could be the first and hardest hit – with unemployment among recent graduates potentially reaching as high as 25% within the next two to three years.

“Let’s look at the fact we never did anything on social media,” Warner told CNBC. “If we make that same response on AI and don’t put guardrails, I think we will come to rue that day.”