In 1980’s, Hinton, a University of Toronto professor, began his work on neural networks. These networks were trained by data, rather than programming them conventionally. This was an attempt to give computers intelligence. Hinton received the Turing Award in 2018 for his work on neural networks. The other two scientists who shared this prize with Hinton were LeCun and Bengio. LeCun is with Facebook and Bengio with University of Montreal.

Hinton joined Google in 2013. In fact, Google acquired his company DNN Research which tried to commercialize deep learning ideas.

Researchers at Google devised a new neural network called Transformer which gave birth to models such as GPT4 and PaLM. Hinton co-invented backpropagation which is a fundamental algorithm for training neural networks. He also contributed in developing Boltzmann Machines which are probabilistic generative models. These machines learn to represent complex data distributions.

Though neural networks are inspired by biological networks in the brain, human brain is more advanced as it learns from less data. Still we have much to learn about the complex relationship between AI and human cognition.

Hinton feels AI systems understand similar world views, as they cannot appreciate different interpretations of the same physical reality. Hinton is hopeful about machines being appreciative of different perspectives.

It is a moot point whether coding will be relevant when AI is advancing so rapidly.

Hinton is all praise for Microsoft-backed OpenAI for launching ChatGPT, and is also appreciative of the cautious approach of Google.