The 75-year-old computer scientist has divided his time between the University of Toronto and Google since 2013, when the tech giant acquired Hinton’s AI startup DNNresearch. Hinton’s company was a spin-out from his research group, which was doing innovative work with machine learning for image recognition on the time. Google used that technology to spice up photo search and more.  

Hinton has long called out ethical questions around AI, especially its co-option for military purposes. He has said that one reason he selected to spend much of his profession in Canada is that it is simpler to get research funding that doesn’t have ties to the U.S. Department of Defense. 

“Geoff has made foundational breakthroughs in AI, and we appreciate his decade of contributions at Google,” says Google chief scientist Jeff Dean. “I’ve deeply enjoyed our many conversations over time. I’ll miss him, and I wish him well.”

Dean says: “As considered one of the primary corporations to publish AI Principles, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to know emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

Hinton is best known for an algorithm called backpropagation, which he first proposed with two colleagues within the Eighties. The technique, which allows artificial neural networks to learn, today underpins nearly all machine learning models. In a nutshell, backpropagation is a method to adjust the connections between artificial neurons again and again until a neural network produces the specified output. 

Hinton believed that backpropagation mimicked how biological brains learn. He has been on the lookout for even higher approximations since, but never improved on it.