What to know about Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI

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Tuesday, British-Canadian professor Geoffrey Hinton was one of two recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning. Here’s what to know about the 76-year-old Hinton, who is often referred to within the industry as the “Godfather of AI”

Who is Geoffrey Hinton?

Geoffrey Everest Hinton was born in London, England, in 1947. He went to school in Bristol and then attended King’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology. He then studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he earned a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978. His thesis paper, “Relaxation and Its Role in Vision,” was about machine vision and learning.

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How did he wind up in Canada?

Hinton first worked at the University of Sussex in England, and then at several U.S. universities. But according to a profile in the New York Times, he moved to Canada in the 1980s because he was upset with military funding of AI research in the United States. He is (among other things) a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.

Why is he called The Godfather of AI?

Hinton has long been interested in artificial neural networks — computer learning systems inspired by the way neurons are connected in the brain. A New Yorker profile notes that, when he saw The Terminator in the 1980s, he was pleased to note that Skynet, the machine intelligence that takes over the world, was a neural net; it meant someone was taking the technology seriously.

But development in the field was slow — until suddenly it wasn’t. He told the New Yorker that he imagined his work might bear fruit in a century. Instead, in just a few years, computers used the vast amount of data available on the Internet to train themselves and become better at transcribing and translating speech, identifying objects, recognizing faces, driving cars, even creating art and poetry.

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“It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution,” he told the BBC after his Nobel win. “But instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities.”

Is he concerned about the technology he helped create?

Very. “I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control,” he told the BBC, echoing the threat posed by Skynet in the Terminator movies.

It’s not a new concern for him. In 2017, he put his name on an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that called for an international ban on the weaponization of AI.

“Members of the Artificial Intelligence research community exhort the Prime Minister of Canada to join the international call to ban lethal autonomous weapons that remove meaningful human control in the deployment of lethal force,” it said.

The same year, he co-founded the Vector Institute, a non-profit AI research institute whose work includes using the technology to combat climate change and streamline health care delivery. It has worked with Kids Help Phone on a tool to help guide councillors who talk to children, and this week announced the development of an AI chatbot that can help air travellers understand their rights when flying. The institute has also given out some $2 million in scholarships.

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For 10 years, Hinton worked for Google in its AI development arm known as Google Brain. But he quit in May of 2023, in part so that he could speak more freely about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Is the Nobel Prize his first major honour?

Hardly, though it is quite the feather in his cap. Hinton was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998, and in 2001 he became the first recipient of the Rumelhart Prize, given annually to “an individual or collaborative team making a significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition.”

In Canada alone, he has received the Killam Prize in Engineering in 2012, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Sherbrooke in 2013. In 2018 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.

He joins an esteemed list of Canadians who have won the Nobel Prize in physics, including James Peebles (2019; cosmic background radiation), Donna Strickland (2018; laser physics) and Art McDonald (2015, neutrino mass).

Is science in his blood?

It might be. Hinton’s great-great-grandparents were George Boole and Mary Everest Boole. Mary was a mathematician who wrote The Preparation of the Child for Science, which advocated encouraging children to explore math through play. And George created Boolean logic in the mid-1800s. It is now considered one of the foundations of modern computing.

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