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Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton

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About Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton is widely known as the "Godfather of AI" for his foundational contributions to deep learning. He received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and the 2018 Turing Award. In 2023, he left Google to speak freely about AI risks.

Career Highlights

  • University of Toronto (1987-present): Professor Emeritus of Computer Science
  • Google (2013-2023): VP and Engineering Fellow, left to warn about AI risks
  • Nobel Prize in Physics (2024): For foundational discoveries in machine learning
  • Turing Award (2018): With Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio
  • Backpropagation: Co-developed the algorithm that enables deep learning
  • AlexNet (2012): Co-created with Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky

Notable Positions

On Understanding

Hinton's Lego blocks analogy explains how LLMs understand:

"Think of words as thousand-dimensional Lego blocks. Words have 'hands' that want to shake hands with other words. Understanding is deforming these blocks so their hands can connect - that structure IS understanding."

On Chomsky

"I think Chomsky is sort of a cult leader. Language not being learned is manifest nonsense."

On Digital Intelligence

"If energy is cheap, digital computation is just better because it can share knowledge efficiently. GPT-4 knows thousands of times more than any person."

On Hallucinations

"Hallucinations should be called confabulations - we do them too. We don't store files and retrieve them; we construct memories when we need them."

Key Quotes

  • "That structure IS understanding."
  • "GPT-4 knows thousands of times more than any person."
  • "LLMs understand the same way we do."