PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Geoffrey Hinton

Also known as Geoff Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton is an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto and a public voice on AI safety. He studied experimental psychology at Cambridge and completed an AI doctorate at Edinburgh. His research includes shared work on Boltzmann machines with David Ackley and Terrence Sejnowski, and backpropagation with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams. In Toronto, he worked with Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever on AlexNet. He began working half-time at Google in 2013 and shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. After leaving Google, he said he wanted to discuss AI dangers more freely. He and John Hopfield received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. His future-risk statements remain warnings about uncertain outcomes.

Works
560
Citations
501,550
h-index
145

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Geoffrey Hinton

Timeline

  1. 1970–1978

    A psychology student enters AI

    He studies psychology at Cambridge and completes an AI doctorate at Edinburgh.

  2. 1986

    Sending the error backward

    He, David Rumelhart, and Ronald Williams publish work on backpropagation.

  3. 2012

    A photograph breakthrough

    With Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, he helps build the ImageNet-winning AlexNet system.

  4. May 2023

    Explaining his departure

    After leaving Google, he explains his decision to speak publicly about AI risks.

  5. 2024–today

    An award and a public task

    He shares the physics Nobel Prize with John Hopfield and continues public safety work.

Sources and credits

Photo: Cmichel67, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Geoffrey Hinton: University of Toronto biography cs.toronto.edu. Checked 10 October 2026.
  2. Ackley, Hinton and Sejnowski: A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines, 1985 cs.toronto.edu. Checked 10 October 2026.
  3. Hinton: Backpropagation publications cs.toronto.edu. Checked 10 October 2026.
  4. Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton: ImageNet paper, 2012 papers.nips.cc. Checked 10 October 2026.
  5. Hinton: Awards and Fellowships cs.toronto.edu. Checked 10 October 2026.
  6. Nobel Prize: Physics 2024 award record nobelprize.org. Checked 10 October 2026.
  7. Hinton: original departure statement, 1 May 2023 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  8. University of Toronto: Hinton's AI safety work, 16 January 2026 utoronto.ca. Checked 10 October 2026.