Geoffrey Everest Hinton CC FRS FRSC born 6 December 1947, 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 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, Geoffrey 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. He 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.

Geoffrey 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, Geoffrey 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 and added that a part of him now regrets his life’s work.

Notable former Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers from his group include Peter Dayan, Sam Roweis, Max Welling, Richard Zemel, Brendan Frey, Radford M. Neal, Yee Whye Teh, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun, Alex Graves, and Zoubin Ghahramani. Geoffrey Hinton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1998. He was the first winner of the Rumelhart Prize in 2001.

In 2001, Geoffrey Hinton was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He was the 2005 recipient of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award. He has also been awarded the 2011 Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université de Sherbrooke.

In 2016, he was elected a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering “for contributions to the theory and practice of artificial neural networks and their application to speech recognition and computer vision”. He also received the 2016 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award. He has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2016) in the Information and Communication Technologies category “for his pioneering and highly influential work” to endow machines with the ability to learn.

Together with Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. In 2018, he became a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2022 he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the Scientific Research category, along with Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Demis Hassabis.

In 2023, Geoffrey Hinton expressed concerns about the rapid progress of rapid A.I. He previously believed that artificial general intelligence was “30 to 50 years or even longer away.” However, in a March 2023 interview with CBS, he stated that “general-purpose AI” may be fewer than 20 years away and could bring about changes “comparable in scale with the Industrial Revolution or electricity.”

He expressed concerns about the AI takeover, stating that “it’s not inconceivable” that AI could “wipe out humanity.” Geoffrey Hinton states that AI systems capable of intelligent agency will be useful for military or economic purposes. He worries that generally intelligent AI systems could “create sub-goals” that are unaligned with their programmers’ interests. He states that AI systems may become power-seeking or prevent themselves from being shut off, not because programmers intended them to, but because those sub-goals are useful for achieving later goals. In particular, Hinton says “we have to think hard about how to control” AI systems capable of self-improvement.

Geoffrey Hinton worries about the deliberate misuse of AI by malicious actors, stating that “it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using [AI] for bad things.” In 2017, Hinton called for an international ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

What is Geoffrey Hinton relationship status?

Much is known about Geoffrey Hinton’s married life, it is known that he lost his second spouse to ovarian cancer.