[AI New Year Interview] Who is Professor Hinton... The 'AI Development Contributor' Recognized by ChatGPT

When asked to name a famous scholar who contributed to the creation of today's artificial intelligence (AI), ChatGPT's first response was Professor Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto.

ChatGPT explained that there are several renowned researchers who have made significant contributions to AI development so far, but "one famous figure is often called the 'Godfather of Deep Learning,' Professor Hinton. His research laid the foundation for neural network studies and sparked renewed interest in deep learning in the 21st century." It added, "Among his research, the development of the backpropagation algorithm for training artificial neural networks played a major role in the advancement of machine learning and AI," further noting that "this led to groundbreaking progress in image and speech recognition fields."

Professor Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto [Image provided by Geoffrey Hinton]

As ChatGPT introduced, Professor Hinton is a world-renowned authority in the field of deep learning, which forms the basis of today's AI. True to his nickname as the AI godfather, distinguished AI scholars and researchers such as Yann LeCun of New York University, Ilya Sutskever, one of the founders of OpenAI, and Alex Graves of DeepMind are considered his prot?g?s. AI technologies encountered in daily life?such as the voice recognition functions of AI speakers like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri?as well as autonomous driving and facial recognition technologies, are all based on Professor Hinton's research results. His representative research outcome, backpropagation, also became a foundational technology for large language models (LLMs).

Professor Hinton, who had an interest in the brain from childhood, earned a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh. He then worked at the University of Sussex and Carnegie Mellon University before joining the University of Toronto. His machine learning company, DNN Research, which he founded, was acquired by Google in 2013, and he concurrently led Google's AI research for about ten years. In 2018, he received the Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computer engineering.

Having made remarkable contributions to AI research, Professor Hinton's sudden resignation from Google in May last year drew significant attention to the reasons behind it. His subsequent statements such as "I regret my life" and "I fear the day AI will turn into killer robots" served as a wake-up call to the world, which had been cheering the AI boom including ChatGPT.

What will AI that surpasses humanity attempt to do? Can humans truly control such AI? What should we do now? These are the questions and warnings he poses to Korean readers through an interview with Asia Economy amid all the uncertainties.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.