Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist and psychologist best known for his contributions to artificial neural networks. 

Like many of his counterparts, Hinton has divided his time between business and academia and, with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, is often referred to as one of the “Godfathers of AI”.

Education and early contributions

Hinton earned a Bachelor of Arts in Experimental Psychology from Cambridge University in 1970, and then a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. 

After finding it difficult to secure capital in Britain, he then worked at various universities in North America such as San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California.

In the early 1980s, Hinton was focused on the creation of artificial neural networks and at some point was part of a team that developed a backpropagation algorithm. Hinton and his colleagues were not the only team working on such an algorithm, but they were the first to incorporate it into a small, primitive language Model.

Over this period, Hinton also co-developed Boltzmann machines, a stochastic model and statistical physics technique used in cognitive science.

DNNresearch and Google

Hinton worked at the University of Toronto in the early 2000s and was director of the institution’s Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program. He later co-founded DNNresearch with two of his graduate students in Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky in 2012. 

The trio’s substantive work on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) soon attracted the attention of Google, and the start-up was subsequently acquired by the company in 2013. Google had also previously awarded Hinton a $600,000 gift to support his research. 

Hinton stayed on with Google post-acquisition and played a crucial role in its efforts to apply deep learning techniques to various applications and improve machine learning model capabilities. He also continued to spend some of his time at the University of Toronto.

After spending a decade on the development of large-scale neural networks trained from vast datasets, Hinton found himself in charge of Google Brain alongside Jeff Dean and Zoubin Ghahramani in 2021.

Hinton quits Google

Hinton quit Google in May 2023 over concerns about the future of artificial intelligence. Specifically, he took issue with not only the existential risk of AI but also its ability to spread misinformation and negatively impact the job market.

While the 75-year-old Hinton also admitted it was time to retire, his views on the relationship between the brain and a digital intelligence ultimately forced his hand: “Over the last few months, I’ve changed my mind completely, and I think probably the computer models are working in a completely different way than the brain. They’re using back propagation and I think the brain’s probably not.”

In the immediate term, the ability for computers to learn quickly and teach other computers en masse has Hinton worried. The same could also be said for GPT-4, the latest iteration of a model that displays common-sense reasoning and which Hinton believes has the potential to rapidly increase its intelligence level.

Key takeaways:

• Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist and psychologist best known for his contributions to artificial neural networks. Like many of his counterparts, Hinton has divided his time between business and academia and, with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, is often referred to as one of the “Godfathers of AI”.
• In the early 1980s, Hinton was focused on the creation of artificial neural networks and was part of a team that developed a backpropagation algorithm. Hinton and his colleagues were the first to incorporate these algorithms into a language model.
• Hinton later co-founded DNNresearch with two of his graduate students in Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky in 2012. The University of Toronto start-up was soon acquired by Google, with Hinton eventually progressing to lead Google Brain before his resignation in 2023.

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