If you’re surprised by the rapid progress of AI, you aren’t alone — one of the godfathers of the technology seems just as surprised as well.
Geoffrey Hinton, who is one of the godfathers of AI and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions last year, has said that he didn’t believe that AI systems would be able to speak English within his lifetime. But AI systems have gone far beyond merely speaking English, and can now write code, analyze data, and even generate images and video.
“I never thought I’d live to see, for example, an AI system or a neural net that could actually talk English in a way that was as good as a natural English speaker and could answer any question,” Hinton said in a recent interview. “You can ask it about anything and it’ll behave like a not very good expert. It knows thousands of times more than any one person. It’s still not as good at reasoning, but it’s getting to be pretty good at reasoning, and it’s getting better all the time,” he added.
Hinton is one of the figures that has been instrumental in conducting early research that has led to the current AI revolution. His early contributions to artificial intelligence (AI) were foundational in the development of neural networks and deep learning. In the 1980s, he co-introduced the backpropagation algorithm, a method that enables neural networks to learn by adjusting weights based on error gradients, which became a cornerstone for training deep neural networks. He also co-invented Boltzmann machines in 1985, a type of stochastic recurrent neural network that models complex data distributions, significantly advancing unsupervised learning techniques.
Geoffrey Hinton played a pivotal role in mentoring Ilya Sutskever, who was one of his graduate students at the University of Toronto and later became a key figure in AI research as the Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Together with another student, Alex Krizhevsky, Hinton co-developed AlexNet in 2012, a deep convolutional neural network that dramatically advanced the field of computer vision by significantly outperforming prior models in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. In 2024, Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on AI systems.
But in spite of having played a massive part in creating the field, the progress in AI seems to have surprised Hinton himself. Which just goes to show how AI might be different from most other new technologies — not only do the people that have created it know exactly how it works, but it also seems to be progressing at a pace that wasn’t foreseen by its creators.