The people convening the week.

Host

Professor Geoffrey Hinton

Nobel laureate in Physics, 2024

Considered the “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton is a distinguished British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist celebrated for his groundbreaking work in artificial neural networks. He has held pivotal roles at Google and the University of Toronto, with over 800,000 citations and collaborations with the most influential minds in AI. In 2024, Professor Hinton was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics. His career continues to be a relentless pursuit of innovation and excellence in the field. Professor Hinton is a co-founder of the AI Safety Foundation (host of The Hinton Lectures), where he also serves on the Nominating Committee for the annual lecture series alongside Beth Barnes, Founder & CEO of METR; Roger Grosse, Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society; and, Shane Legg, co-founder and Chief AGI Scientist at Google DeepMind.

Lecturer

Paul Christiano

Executive Director and Founder, Alignment Research Center

Paul Christiano is a researcher in AI alignment who has led teams across industry, government and civil society. He is the founder and executive director of the Alignment Research Center, where he leads research on white-box analysis of neural networks. He was previously the technical director of the US AI Safety Institute, focused on building technical capacity for AI evaluation within the U.S. government. Before that he was an early researcher at OpenAI, where he developed reinforcement learning from human feedback and led a team scaling it up to production environments. He has been writing and speaking about alignment for more than a decade and received his PhD from UC Berkeley. On September 9, 2026 Paul also joined the OpenAI Foundation Board and the Safety and Security Committee (SSC) of the OpenAI Foundation.

Moderator

Sínead Bovell

Strategic Foresight Advisor and Founder, WAYE

Sínead Bovell is a futurist and strategic foresight advisor whose work examines how emerging technologies reshape the systems and institutions that underpin society. She advises senior leaders across business, government, and multilateral institutions on making anticipatory decisions that strengthen institutional and societal resilience. Through her writing and public talks, podcast I’ve Got Questions, and technology education initiative WAYE, she works to broaden public understanding of technological change and its implications for society. Sínead is a 14-time speaker at the United Nations and has delivered keynotes and formal addresses to presidents, royalty, NATO and Fortune 500 leaders on the societal and strategic implications of emerging technologies.