Geoffrey Hinton
The Godfather of Deep Learning
Backpropagation, and thirty years of being right too early
Rating
99Impact score
Domains
Neural networksBackpropagationDeep learning
Scouting report
Co-authored the 1986 paper that made backpropagation practical, then spent the AI winter insisting neural networks would work while the field moved on. Was proved right in 2012 when his students won ImageNet by a margin nobody could argue with. Shared the 2018 Turing Award and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, and left Google to speak freely about the risks.
Curator’s note
The whole field is downstream of one person refusing to change his mind.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Geoffrey Hinton by Cmichel67, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources
- 01Geoffrey Hinton en.wikipedia.org
- 02ACM A.M. Turing Award 2018 amturing.acm.org