When Jeffrey E. Hinton, often referred to as the “Godfather of AI,” learned that he had been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, he was staying in a budget hotel in California, where internet access was nonexistent and phone signals were poor. At 76 years old, Hinton expressed a sense of surprise regarding the honor. During the official Nobel press conference, he responded to reporters via phone, stating, “I was actually supposed to be getting an MRI today, so I might have to cancel that.”
Hinton shares this prestigious award with John J. Hopfield from Princeton University. The Swedish Royal Academy announced on October 8 that the prize recognizes their “fundamental discoveries and inventions in machine learning through artificial neural networks.”
Born in December 1947 in Wimbledon, southwest London, Hinton was educated at Clifton College and King’s College, Cambridge. Even in college, he demonstrated an interdisciplinary approach, switching between fields like natural sciences, art history, philosophy, and experimental psychology. After furthering his studies at the University of Edinburgh, he earned his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1978. He has since held positions at several universities in the UK and the US and is a founder of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.
In 1987, he joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto, where he has remained for 37 years. He is currently an emeritus professor there and serves as the chief scientific advisor at the Vector Institute, one of Canada’s premier national AI research institutes. His research primarily focuses on how neural networks can enable machines to learn, remember, perceive, and process symbols.
Interestingly, Hinton’s personal page on the University of Toronto website is quite sparse, featuring only a few lines of text and links against a brown background. He has stated that he is no longer accepting students, postdocs, or visiting scholars.
Hinton’s academic stature in the field of artificial neural networks was recognized in 1998 when he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2001, he became the first recipient of the prestigious Rumelhart Prize in cognitive science. In 2016, he was elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States.
Prior to receiving the Nobel Prize, Hinton had another significant achievement; in 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” along with Yoshua Bengio from the University of Montreal and Yann LeCun from New York University, for their contributions to AI deep learning.
In 2013, Hinton joined Google, which had acquired the deep neural network startup he founded. However, in May 2023, he resigned from Google and expressed concerns about the risks associated with AI, even revealing some regret regarding his work. The New York Times quoted him saying, “It’s hard to see how to prevent bad people from using it (AI) to do bad things.”
University of Toronto President Meric Gertler expressed immense pride in Hinton’s historic achievements. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau praised Hinton as a pioneer who has positioned Canada at the forefront of AI technology.
During the Nobel press conference, Hinton continued to voice his concerns about the development of AI. A frequent user of ChatGPT, he believes that the impact of AI will rival that of the Industrial Revolution, but will surpass humans intellectually rather than physically. While AI has the potential to significantly boost productivity across various fields, he cautioned that society must also be wary of its possible negative consequences, hoping things “won’t spiral out of control.”
“In the same circumstances, I would still do the same work (research),” Hinton stated, “but I worry that this could lead to systems that are ultimately more intelligent than us controlling everything.”
