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Geoff Hinton    

Distinguished Emeritus Professor at University of Toronto; Former Distinguished Researcher at Google

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023 citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. After leaving, he has commended Google for acting "very responsibly" while developing their AI but changed once Microsoft started incorporating a chatbot into its Bing search engine, and the company began becoming concerned about the risk to its search business. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.

With David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularised the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks, although they were not the first to propose the approach. Hinton is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning community. The dramatic image-recognition milestone of the AlexNet designed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge 2012 was a breakthrough in the field of computer vision.

Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning", and have continued to give public talks together.

In May 2023, Hinton announced his resignation from Google in order to be able to "freely speak out about the risks of A.I." He has voiced concerns about deliberate misuse by malicious actors, technological unemployment, and existential risk from artificial general intelligence.

News


Google Just Open Sourced TensorFlow, Its Artificial Intelligence Engine
Deep learning originated with academics who openly shared their ideas, and many of them now work at Google—including University of Toronto professor Geoff Hinton, the godfather of deep learning...

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