Geoffrey Hinton

British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist; Emeritus Distinguished University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he held a faculty position from 1987. A central figure in the development of modern deep learning, known for foundational work on backpropagation, Boltzmann machines, and the practical use of deep neural networks at scale. He shared the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing," and in October 2024 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with John Hopfield) for foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks.

From 2013 to May 2023 he held a part-time research role at Google Brain, joining under Google's acquisition of his DNNresearch startup. On 1 May 2023 he announced his departure, stating he wanted to speak freely about AI risks. He told the New York Times he had begun to believe the risks from AI were more urgent than he had previously thought — particularly the prospect of large language models surpassing human intelligence and the danger of AI being used by malicious actors. Later that month, on 30 May 2023, he co-signed the Center for AI Safety's one-sentence statement: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

On 4 June 2024 he publicly endorsed "A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence" alongside Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell — the open letter by current and former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees demanding structural whistleblower protections inside frontier-AI companies. The letter is documented in the insider whistleblowing from frontier labs strategy entry; that entry's analysis attributes mainstream coverage and political legitimacy partly to his and Bengio's backing.