A Brief History of Geoffrey Hinton

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0900

In October 2024, the Nobel Committee awarded the Physics prize to a man who never studied physics — for building something he now thinks might destroy us.

That man had spent thirty years being told he was wrong. Most of that time, he believed everyone else was.

That man is Geoffrey Hinton, AKA the godfather of AI.

Geoffrey Hinton was born in London in 1947. His great-great-grandfather was George Boole — the mathematician whose logic sits at the foundation of every computer ever built. Hinton studied psychology at Cambridge, got a PhD in AI at Edinburgh, and arrived in the field with one conviction: machines should learn the way brains do, not by following rules someone wrote for them.

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A Brief History of Geoffrey Hinton