Godfather of AI: Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "Godfather of AI," is a renowned computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and is celebrated for developing neural networks that lay the foundation of today's Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, including ChatGPT, facial recognition, and self-driving cars.
Hinton is also widely known for raising concerns about AI's dangers-warning that there is about a 10 per cent chance AI could wipe out humanity. Recently, he highlighted how AI might cause widespread unemployment.
"What's actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It's going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That's not AI's fault, that is the capitalist system," Hinton said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Geoffrey's Educational Qualifications
Geoffrey completed his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.
He later worked as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University for five years before joining the University of Toronto, where he became a professor in 2006.
One of Hinton's groundbreaking contributions is Backpropagation-a learning technique where neural networks improve predictions by adjusting their weights (which decide how strongly one neuron influences another).
In 2023, he quit his job at Google so that he could speak freely about the risks of AI. Since 2017, he has also served as the Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vector Institute in Toronto.