Definition: Godfather of AI

British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Everest Hinton is considered the Godfather of AI because of his work in the field that dates back to the 1980s. Hinton was involved in many AI disciplines and achievements. In 1986, he co-authored a 1986 paper on backpropagation, which is an essential process in machine learning today (see AI backpropagation). He is noted for AlexNet, which was a breakthrough neural network in computer vision (see AlexNet), and he received the Turing Award in 2018 with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for deep learning (see Turing Award). Along with John Hopfield, Hinton won the Nobel Price in 2024 for machine learning.

For a decade starting in 2013, Hinton worked for Google Brain and the University of Toronto. In 2017, he co-founded the Vector Institute, an AI research lab. Hinton has held numerous titles and worked at several universities.

Dr. Geoffrey E. Hinton in 2026

There is hardly anyone who has been celebrated more for contributions to AI than Geoffrey Hinton. (Image courtesy of Cmichel67 and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)