Geoffrey Hinton Quotes

The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.

But, there is one thing…If you think it is a really good idea, and other people tell you it’s COMPLETE NONSENSE. Then you are really onto something. —Deep Learning AI Pioneer, Geoffrey Hinton

Deep learning’s big technical break finally arrived in the mid-2000s, when leading researcher Geoffrey Hinton discovered a way to efficiently train those new layers in neural networks. The result was like giving steroids to the old neural networks, multiplying their power to perform tasks such as speech and object recognition. Soon, these juiced-up neural networks—now rebranded as “deep learning”—could outperform older models at a variety of tasks.

The third wave of neural networks research began with a breakthrough in 2006. Geoffrey Hinton showed that a kind of neural network called a deep belief network could be efficiently trained using a strategy called greedy layer-wise pretraining (Hinton et al., 2006),

In terms of funding, Google dwarfs even its own government: U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R&D budget. That spending spree has bought Alphabet an outsized share of the world’s brightest AI minds. Of the top one hundred AI researchers and engineers, around half are already working for Google. The other half are distributed among the remaining Seven Giants, academia, and a handful of smaller startups. Microsoft and Facebook have soaked up substantial portions of this group, with Facebook bringing on superstar researchers like Yann LeCun. Of the Chinese giants, Baidu went into deep-learning research earliest—even trying to acquire Geoffrey Hinton’s startup in 2013 before being outbid by Google—and scored a major coup in 2014 when it recruited Andrew Ng to head up its Silicon Valley AI Lab.