Canadian 'godfather of A.I.' and U of T prof Geoffrey Hinton co-wins Nobel Prize

Reportedly upset with military funding of A.I. research in the U.S., Geoffrey Hinton moved to Canada in 1980s. In 2017, he put his name on an open letter to Trudeau that called for an international ban on the weaponization of A.I.

This week, British-Canadian professor Geoffrey Hinton was one of two recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning. Here’s what to know about Hinton, who is often referred to within the industry as the “Godfather of A.I.”

Who is Geoffrey Hinton?

Geoffrey Everest Hinton was born in London, England, in 1947. He went to school in Bristol and then attended King’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology. He then studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he earned a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978. His thesis paper, “Relaxation and Its Role in Vision,” was about machine vision and learning.