Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist born in London, England, in 1947, and he holds Canadian and British citizenship. He studied experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge and received a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. After teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, he taught at the University of Toronto in Canada from 1987. From 2013 to 2023 he also did research at Google alongside his university work. As of October 2026, he is an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.

Hinton has spent many years researching artificial neural networks (a way of computing that imitates the connections between nerve cells in the brain). In 1986, through papers written with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams, he helped to popularise backpropagation (a learning method in which a network traces its mistakes backwards and corrects them). With David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski, he also introduced a type of neural network called the 'Boltzmann machine', and a restricted form of it later suited the layered approach of deep learning. In 2012, a program he built with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever performed far better than all the other entrants in the ImageNet competition, which tests how well computers recognise objects in pictures.

From 1998 to 2001, Hinton was the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London (UCL). In 2017 he co-founded the Vector Institute in Canada and became its Chief Scientific Adviser. In 2019 he received the 2018 Turing Award (a prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM) together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, 'for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing'. In 2024 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield 'for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks'. In May 2023, when he announced that he had left Google, he said he wanted to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how this would affect Google's business.