Toronto – October 05, 2026 -- The Hinton Lectures, co-founded by Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, will return to Toronto for a third year on November 9-11, 2026, naming Paul Christiano as this year's distinguished lecturer.

Christiano brings OpenAI and alignment credentials to the stage

Christiano was an early researcher at OpenAI, where he developed reinforcement learning from human feedback, a technique now foundational to large language model training. He currently serves as founder and executive director of the Alignment Research Center, a non-profit focused on understanding decision-making inside machine learning systems. He also holds roles as Senior Technical Advisor at NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation, Board Member of the OpenAI Foundation, and Member of the OpenAI Safety and Security Committee.

A TIME100-studded nominating committee selected the speaker

The Nominating Committee includes Hinton, Beth Barnes (Founder and CEO of METR), Roger Grosse (Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society), and Shane Legg (co-founder and Chief AGI Scientist at Google DeepMind). Hinton, Christiano, Barnes and Legg have each appeared on TIME100's list of the most influential people in AI.

Three-night series kicks off the inaugural AI Safety Week

Lectures will be hosted at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre's John W. H. Bassett Theatre and broadcast online, launching the first-ever AI Safety Week. Canadian futurist and podcaster Sínead Bovell, founder of tech education initiative WAYE, will moderate the sessions.

Manulife, GRI and TELUS back this year's program

Manulife returns as Presenting Partner and Global Risk Institute (GRI) as Founding Partner, with TELUS joining as an evening sponsor. "The pressing question now isn't what these systems can do, but what they should do and who gets to decide,