Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton
CC FRS FRSC
Hinton speaking in Toronto in 2024
Born
Geoffrey Everest Hinton

(1947-12-06) 6 December 1947 (age 78)
Wimbledon, London, England
Education
Known for
Spouse(s)Joanne
Rosalind Zalin
​
(died 1994)​

Jackie Ford
​
​
(m. 1997; died 2018)​
Children2
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisRelaxation and its role in vision (1977)
Doctoral advisorChristopher Longuet-Higgins
Doctoral students
Other notable students
Websitewww.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton Edit this at Wikidata

Geoffrey Everest Hinton CC FRS FRSC (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist. He is known for his work on artificial intelligence (AI). He has been called the "godfather of artificial intelligence".

From 2013 to 2023, he worked for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto. In May 2023, he left Google so that he could 'freely' talk about the risks of AI.

Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning.

Hinton was awarded with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing it with John Hopfield, becoming the first person to win both the Turing and Physics Nobel awards.

Early life

Hinton was born in Wimbledon, London. He studied at Clifton College in Bristol and King's College, Cambridge. He originally studied natural sciences, history of art, and philosophy, but graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology.

He continued his study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978.

Career

Hinton co-wrote a highly cited paper published in 1986 that made the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks popular.

Hinton's research focuses on using neural networks for machine learning, memory, perception, and symbol processing. He has written or co-written more than 200 peer reviewed publications.

In 1985, Hinton co-invented Boltzmann machines with David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski.

In May 2023, Hinton announced his resignation from Google 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. He noted that establishing safety guidelines will require cooperation among those competing in use of AI in order to avoid the worst outcomes.

Personal life

Hinton's second wife, Rosalind Zalin, died of ovarian cancer in 1994; his third wife, Jackie, died in September 2018, also of cancer. Hinton has two children.

Hinton moved from the United States to Canada because he did not like the Ronald Reagan-era politics and military funding of artificial intelligence.

His relatives included Colin Clark (uncle), George Boole (great-great-grandfather), Mary Everest Boole (great-great-grandmother), George Everest (great-great-granduncle), Joan Hinton (cousin).

Notes

  1. ↑ Herbert A. Simon is the first person to win a Turing Award and a Nobel Prize in general

References

  1. ↑ Anon (2015) ,. Who's Who (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help) closed access doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.20261
  2. ↑ Zemel, Richard Stanley (1994). A minimum description length framework for unsupervised learning (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. OCLC 222081343. ProQuest 304161918.
  3. ↑ Frey, Brendan John (1998). Bayesian networks for pattern classification, data compression, and channel coding (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. OCLC 46557340. ProQuest 304396112.
  4. ↑ Neal, Radford (1995). Bayesian learning for neural networks (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. OCLC 46499792. ProQuest 304260778.
  5. ↑ Whye Teh, Yee (2003). Bethe free energy and contrastive divergence approximations for undirected graphical models. utoronto.ca (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/122253. OCLC 56683361. ProQuest 305242430. Archived from the original on 30 March 2023. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  6. ↑ Salakhutdinov, Ruslan (2009). Learning deep generative models (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. ISBN 978-0-494-61080-0. OCLC 785764071. ProQuest 577365583.
  7. ↑ Sutskever, Ilya (2013). Training Recurrent Neural Networks. utoronto.ca (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/36012. OCLC 889910425. ProQuest 1501655550. Archived from the original on 26 March 2023. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  8. ↑ Anon (1998). "Professor Geoffrey Hinton FRS". Royal Society. London. Archived from the original on 3 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 11 November 2016. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  9. ↑ ""Godfather of artificial intelligence" talks impact and potential of new AI". CBS News. 25 March 2023. Archived from the original on 28 March 2023. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
  10. ↑ Douglas Heaven, Will (1 May 2023). "Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Google". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 1 May 2023. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  11. 1 2 Metz, Cade (1 May 2023). "'The Godfather of A.I.' Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 1 May 2023. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  12. ↑ Chung, Emily (27 March 2019). "Canadian researchers who taught AI to learn like humans win $1M award". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on 26 February 2020. Retrieved 27 March 2019.
  13. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2024-10-08.
  14. ↑ "Geoffrey Hinton from University of Toronto awarded Nobel Prize in Physics". CBC News. The Associated Press. 8 October 2024. Retrieved 8 October 2024.
  15. ↑ "Nobel Prize in Physics: Statistical Physics and Machine Learning, Whats the connection?". Medium. Retrieved 8 October 2024.
  16. ↑ "Former CMU Faculty Geoffrey Hinton Awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics". CMU.edu. 8 October 2024. Retrieved 8 October 2024.
  17. ↑ Onstad, Katrina (2018-01-29). "Mr. Robot". Toronto Life. Retrieved 2023-12-24.
  18. ↑ Hinton, Geoffrey Everest (1977). Relaxation and its role in vision. Edinburgh Research Archive (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/8121. OCLC 18656113. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.482889. Archived from the original on 30 March 2023. Retrieved 30 March 2023. Free to read
  19. ↑ Ackley, David H; Hinton Geoffrey E; Sejnowski, Terrence J (1985), "A learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines", Cognitive science, Elsevier, 9 (1): 147–169
  20. ↑ ""Godfather of artificial intelligence" talks impact and potential of new AI". CBS News. 25 March 2023. Archived from the original on 28 March 2023. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
  21. ↑ Erlichman, Jon, '50-50 chance' that AI outsmarts humanity, Geoffrey Hinton says, BNN Bloomberg, June 14, 2024
  22. ↑ Rothman, Joshua (13 November 2023). "Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He's Built". The New Yorker. Retrieved 27 November 2023.
  23. ↑ https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309026/geoffrey-hinton/ Archived 2025-06-18 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-12-12