2024 Nobel Laureate in Physics

"Godfather of AI"

As a founding figure in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Jeffrey Hinton holds dual British and Canadian citizenship. A world-renowned cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, he has reshaped the trajectory of AI development through his groundbreaking research on neural networks. After earning his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978, he taught at top-tier institutions including Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Edinburgh University of Toronto. From 2013 to 2023, he served as Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google.

Hinton’s pivotal discoveries in areas such as the backpropagation algorithm and Boltzmann machines broke through the technical bottlenecks of early AI research, laying the foundational groundwork for modern AI technologies like computer vision and large language models (LLMs). His 1986 paper, which popularized the backpropagation algorithm, continues to influence nearly all neural network systems to this day. As of 2025, his published papers have been cited over 630,000 times, with an H-index of 174; he has also supervised 59 master’s and doctoral students. Following his receipt of the Turing Award in 2018, he was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, making him a rare recipient of two of the most prestigious awards spanning the fields of computer science and physics.​