Geoffrey Hinton

 

Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton (born December 6, 1947) is a world-renowned British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, widely celebrated as the "Godfather of AI". He is most famous for his foundational work on artificial neural networks, which provides the bedrock for modern deep learning and generative AI.

2024 Nobel Prize in Physics: Awarded jointly with John Hopfield for "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks," specifically citing his development of the Boltzmann machine.

2018 Turing Award: Often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing," he received this alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their breakthroughs in deep neural networks.

Backpropagation: He popularized the backpropagation algorithm in 1986, which allows neural networks to "learn" from their mistakes by adjusting internal parameters.

Google & Academic Life: He was a Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google until 2023 and is currently a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.

Job Displacement: He has warned of a "jobless boom" as early as 2026, predicting that AI will replace many white-collar and knowledge-based roles.

Safety Concerns: He fears that superintelligent systems could become uncontrollable, spread misinformation, or even threaten human existence.

Maternal Instincts: He has proposed that developers should build "maternal instincts" into AI to ensure these systems prioritize human well-being.

Personal Context

Hinton comes from a distinguished intellectual lineage; he is the great-great-grandson of logician George Boole, whose Boolean logic is the basis of modern computing, and a relative of George Everest, after whom the mountain is named.