Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winner in physics and the recipient of the Turing Award, said on Monday that carefully selecting data is essential for ensuring the safety of large language models (LLMs).
Hinton made the comments in his conversation with Jany Hejuan Zhao, the founder and CEO of NextFin.AI, during the 2025 T-EDGE that kicked off on Monday, December 8 and lasts through December 21.
“At present, the big language models tend to be trained on all the data you can get your hands on and that will include things like the diaries of serial killers,” said Hinton. “That seems like a bad idea to me. If I were teaching my child to read, I wouldn't teach them to read on the diaries of serial killers. I wouldn't let them read that until they had already developed a strong moral sense and realized it was wrong.”
“So I think we do need a lot more curation although it'll mean there's less data. But I believe we need much stronger curation of the data. So I think you can make AI less dangerous and less likely to do bad things by curating the data,” said Hinton.
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