The "father of AI"
Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born December 6, 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, renowned for his work on artificial neural networks. He is often referred to as the "Godfather of AI" for his foundational contributions to the field.
Hinton is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 2013 to 2023, he worked for Google Brain and the University of Toronto. In May 2023, he announced his departure from Google to focus on raising awareness about the risks of AI technologies.
Hinton studied at Clifton College in Bristol and King's College, Cambridge, earning a BA in Experimental Psychology in 1970. He later obtained a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.
Hinton's career spans roles at the University of Sussex, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Toronto. He is a co-author of a seminal 1986 paper on backpropagation and co-invented Boltzmann machines in 1985. His work on AlexNet in 2012 revolutionized computer vision.
Hinton joined Google in 2013 following the acquisition of his company DNNresearch Inc. His research explores neural networks, machine learning, and artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Hinton is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences. He received the Turing Award in 2018 with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning. In 2024, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside John Hopfield for his foundational work in neural networks.