Geoff Hinton

British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, Nobel Prize laureate (2024), and the researcher most responsible for keeping neural network research alive during decades of academic skepticism — whose students and ideas now dominate AI.

Kept neural network research alive through the 'AI winter' when the entire field abandoned it, developed backpropagation as a practical training algorithm, and supervised AlexNet — which proved neural networks could match and surpass human vision at scale.