Geoffrey Hinton spent decades on an idea most of his field had written off: that computers could learn the way brains do. That idea now runs chatbots, image generators and voice assistants. It won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024, and he has spent the years since warning that the technology he helped build could slip out of human control.
Related: EU Leaders Meet in Dublin for the Bloc’s First Summit on Artificial Intelligence.
Early life and education
Hinton was born in London on Dec. 6, 1947.[1] He earned a bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology from Cambridge in 1970 and a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.[3]
His starting point was the brain, not the computer. He has described his aim as finding a learning procedure that can pick out complex structure in large sets of data, and showing that this is how the brain learns to see.[3]
From Britain to Toronto
After Edinburgh, Hinton did postdoctoral work at Sussex University and the University of California San Diego. He then spent five years on the computer science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.[3]
He moved to the University of Toronto as a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Apart from three years in London, from 1998 to 2001, when he set up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, Toronto has been his base since. He is now an emeritus professor there.[3] He is usually described as British-Canadian.[4]
The ideas that made modern AI
An artificial neural network is software loosely modeled on the brain. Its “neurons” are nodes that pass signals to each other through connections that grow stronger or weaker as the network is trained.[2]
Between 1983 and 1985, Hinton used tools from statistical physics to create the Boltzmann machine, a network that can learn to recognize the characteristic features in a set of data.[1] The Nobel committee singled out that work. It can be used to classify images or to create new examples of the patterns it was trained on.[2]
Hinton was also one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm.[3] For years the approach was unfashionable. He, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun kept working on neural networks through the 1980s and 1990s.[5] LeCun did his postdoctoral work in Hinton’s Toronto lab.[5]
The turn came in 2012, when Hinton and his students used a deep learning system to beat hand-programmed rivals in an image recognition contest called ImageNet.[5]
That same year Google bought Hinton’s company, DNNresearch, for $44 million.[9] From 2013 to 2023 he worked half-time at Google, where he became a vice president and engineering fellow, while keeping his university post.[3]
He resigned in 2023, at 75, saying he wanted to speak freely about the risks of AI. He told the BBC that chatbots might soon be more intelligent than people. He added, “I’m 75, so it’s time to retire.” He said Google itself had acted responsibly.[6]
The Turing Award and the Nobel Prize
Hinton, Bengio and LeCun shared the 2018 Turing Award, a $1 million prize often called the Nobel Prize of computing, for their work on deep learning.[5]
In October 2024 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Hinton and John Hopfield of Princeton University the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. The two shared 11 million Swedish kronor.[2] “I’m flabbergasted,” Hinton told the academy by phone, CBC News reported.
His other honors include fellowship of the Royal Society, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Princess of Asturias Award and Canada’s Herzberg Gold Medal.[3]
A critic of his own field
Since leaving Google, Hinton has become one of the best-known voices on AI risk. In December 2024 he said there was a 10% to 20% chance that AI would lead to human extinction within 30 years, and that only government regulation could force big companies to do more safety research, the Guardian reported.
He has said AI will take many routine jobs, and told the BBC in 2024 that he had advised British officials that a universal basic income was a good idea.[8] After the Nobel announcement he accused companies including OpenAI of putting profits ahead of safety, CBC News reported.
He has also said that in the shorter term AI would bring more benefits than risks, and that a pause in development would be hard to enforce because of international competition.[6]
His warnings have critics. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said in October that Hinton’s predictions have all been wrong and that his extinction estimate is not grounded in science, the Guardian reported. Hinton answered that he is not predicting an outcome but describing a serious risk. If AI takes over, he told the Guardian, “you don’t get a second chance.”
Timeline
- 1947: Born in London.
- 1970: BA in experimental psychology, Cambridge.
- 1978: PhD in artificial intelligence, University of Edinburgh.
- 1983–1985: Develops the Boltzmann machine.
- 1998–2001: Sets up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London.
- 2012: ImageNet win with his students; Google buys DNNresearch.
- 2013–2023: Works half-time at Google.
- 2018: Turing Award, with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.
- 2023: Leaves Google to speak about AI risk.
- 2024: Nobel Prize in Physics, with John Hopfield.
What he is doing now
Hinton lives in Toronto.[9] His university page says he is no longer taking students, and lists a forthcoming book, “Smarter Than Us,” written with Patchen Barss.[3]
More on The Boston Report: artificial intelligence news, our guide to the major AI companies, Bill Gates on 20 turbulent years of AI, Shigeru Miyamoto on AI and more profiles in People.
Sources
- Nobel Prize: Geoffrey Hinton, Facts
- Nobel Prize: Press release, The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024
- University of Toronto: Geoffrey E. Hinton home page and brief biography
- CBC News: Geoffrey Hinton from University of Toronto awarded Nobel Prize in Physics
- CBC News: Canadian researchers who taught AI to learn like humans win $1M Turing Award
- BBC News: AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google
- The Guardian: ‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years
- BBC News: We’ll need universal basic income, AI ‘godfather’ says
- The Guardian: AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: ‘We’re creating alien beings’
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