Who is Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize-winning scientist who quit Google, then let world know about dangers of AI?

John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton were on Tuesday announced as the winners of 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries and inventions which allow machine learning within synthetic neural networks. Machine learning enables computers using neural networks to imitate the ability learn and memorize details in a way humans do, and this has been made imaginable by the work done by this year’s Nobel laureates.

Geoffrey Hinton, various the two physicists who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is often often often referred to as the “Godfather of AI”, a title which he has earned through his astonishing work within the field.

But interestingly, Hinton, who once worked for Google, quit the tech giant to warn the arena concerning the dangers of Man made Intelligence (AI). Here’s what we know concerning the Nobel-prize winning scientist.

Who is Geoffrey Hinton?

Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, known for his groundbreaking work on synthetic neural networks, which earned him the title “Godfather of AI”. A glorious student since his early years, Hinton joined the Clifton College in Bristol and then the famed King’s College in Cambridge.

In an interview, Hinton revealed he became not sure which course he wanted to take and kept changing subjects between natural science, history of art and philosophy, finally earning a Bachelors degree in experimental psychology in 1970. Eight years later, Hinton received a doctorate (PhD) in Man made Intelligence (AI) in 1978 from the University of Edinburgh, and started tenure at the University of Sussex.

On the alternative hand, Geoffrey Hinton found fund challenging to come by and moved to the United States where he worked at the the University of California, San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. Hinton became also the founding director of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.

Quit Google to warn people about AI threat

Geoffrey Hinton worked with Google for a decade, from 2013 to 2023 while also teaching at the University of Toronto, but in May 2023, the genius scientist publicly resigned from the tech giant, while expressing concerns over the dangers posed by AI technology.

After leaving Google, Hinton co-founded the Vector Institute in Toronto and have became its chief scientific advisor. Currently, the Nobel laureate is a professor within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

He's currently a professor within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Warnings, predictions about AI

Geoffrey Hinton has been very vocal concerning the dangers presented by an unhinged AI, often publicly warning concerning the threat it presents. Asked concerning the impact the technology being built using his research being, Hinton said the subsequent leap in humanity’s technological evolution will be equal to the industrial revolution.

“It'll be the equivalent of the industrial revolution. But as a substitute of overtaking people in physical strength, it’s going to overtake people in intellectual capacity. We do not have any experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Hinton said in a telephonic interview after the Nobel Prize announcement.

On the alternative hand, in addition to the doom and gloom, Hinton has also predicted that his research will spark off technology in order to revolutionize healthcare and medicine, resulting in “huge improvements in productivity.”

“But we also should be troubled a few range of potential bad consequences, in particular concerning the danger of these items getting uncontrolled.” He also warned that AI “knows the way you can program, so it'll in finding methods to maintain away from the constraints we put in place. It'll in finding methods to motivate people to work in step with its own will,” the scientist warned.

Geoffrey Hinton – Awards and laurels

Apart from the winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, Hinton has also won the prestigious Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computing”,  in 2018 together with fellow scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their work within the field of deep learning. On Tuesday, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were announced as the recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Based on the announcement, Hopfield created an associative memory store and reconstruct images and other patterns in data, while Hinton invented one way which automatically finds properties in data, allowing AI-based systems to perceive specific elements in pictures.