Oral History: Geoff Hinton On How AI Came To Be And What We're Supposed To Do With It

Or When An Atheist Carpenter Finds Neural Nets

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Geoff Hinton, who is considered one of the main figures that brought modern AI to fruition. (A very lightly edited version of our conversation follows.)

Hinton, and a small group of like-minded researchers, spent decades in the backwoods of academia trying to make things called neural nets work w…