Geoffrey Hinton

British-Canadian computer scientist often called the "Godfather of AI" — co-invented backpropagation, won the 2018 Turing Award and 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational deep learning work.

Geoffrey Hinton is one of the founding figures of modern deep learning. Born in 1947 in the UK, he spent most of his academic career at the University of Toronto and later split time with Google Brain (2013-2023). He co-invented backpropagation (the algorithm that trains essentially every modern neural network), the Boltzmann Machine, and many of the building-block techniques behind today's AI. He matters because the deep learning revolution traces back to his persistence on neural networks during the 1980s-2000s when most of academia thought they were a dead end. The 2012 "AlexNet" paper from his Toronto lab (with PhD student Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever) blew open ImageNet image classification and is widely cited as the start of the modern AI boom. Honors include the 2018 Turing Award (shared with Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio) and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with John Hopfield) — a remarkable cross-disciplinary recognition. In 2023 Hinton stepped down from Google to speak more freely about AI risk. He has become one of the most prominent voices warning that advanced AI poses serious societal and existential risks, expressing partial regret for his role in pushing the field forward as quickly as it has gone. Related: backpropagation, deep learning, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, AI safety.