#Geoffrey Hinton

The Nobel laureate who spent fifty years building the technology he now warns against — the full story of Hinton's departure from Google, his public warnings about AI risk, and what it means that the person who did more than anyone to make the deep learning revolution possible now believes that revolution may have been a mistake. The most consequential change of mind in the history of AI.

The personal story of Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and their collaborators during the years when neural network research was marginalised, underfunded, and dismissed. The decades of intellectual courage, the specific ideas that kept the research programme alive, and the slow accumulation of results that eventually made the field pay attention. How the most important research programme in modern AI survived by going underground.

The most important algorithm in modern AI was discovered at least three times before anyone paid attention. The full story of backpropagation — its multiple independent inventions, the decades it spent in the shadows of the symbolic AI winter, and the specific confluence of people, ideas, and timing that produced the 1986 paper that changed everything. How an algorithm refused to die, and what happened when the world finally listened.

The full story of the ImageNet competition in 2012 — the weeks of training on two gaming GPUs, the submission that shocked the computer vision world, the researchers who remember exactly where they were when the results came in, and why a single paper changed the trajectory of artificial intelligence. The starting gun of the modern AI era.

He kept working on neural networks when everyone told him it was a dead end. He developed backpropagation, built the research group that produced AlexNet, and triggered the deep learning revolution. Then he quit Google to warn the world that he was afraid of what he had built. The full story of the most important AI researcher of his generation — and the journey from stubborn optimist to frightened sage.