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Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton's file: neural networks through the wilderness, AlexNet, Google, a Nobel Prize, and the pioneer who later started warning about the machinery he helped unleash.
Hinton spent decades working on neural networks while much of computer science doubted them, helped build the intellectual machinery behind deep learning, saw AlexNet detonate the old consensus, joined Google after it bought his tiny company, then left and began publicly warning about the technology’s risks.
HOW THE HELL DID GEOFFREY HINTON GET HERE?
1978
A PHD IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE IT WAS COOL
Hinton completed a PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1978 and continued working on neural networks through years when the approach was unfashionable.
RECEIPTS: Geoffrey Hintonfirst-party
1985
THE NEURAL-NET HERETIC KEEPS GOING
Hinton’s work in the mid-1980s on Boltzmann machines became part of the foundation for modern neural-network learning methods.
RECEIPTS: Nobel Prizereported
2012
ALEXNET BLOWS OPEN COMPUTER VISION
Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever’s deep convolutional neural-network work helped produce the AlexNet breakthrough in image recognition.
RECEIPTS: Geoffrey Hintonfirst-party
Mar 12, 2013
GOOGLE BUYS THE TINY COMPANY AROUND THE BREAKTHROUGH
Google acquired DNNresearch, the University of Toronto spinout formed by Hinton, Krizhevsky and Sutskever, and Hinton began splitting his time between Toronto and Google.
RECEIPTS: University of Torontoreported
2023
THE PIONEER LEAVES GOOGLE AND STARTS WARNING PEOPLE
Hinton left Google in 2023 and said he wanted to speak more freely about risks from rapidly advancing artificial intelligence.
RECEIPTS: University of Torontoreported
Oct 8, 2024
THE NEURAL-NET HERETIC GETS THE NOBEL
Hinton shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks.
RECEIPTS: Nobel Prizereported