“In my numerous discussions with Geoff, I was always the proponent of backpropagation and he was always looking for another learning procedure, one that he thought would be more biologically plausible and perhaps a better model of how learning works in the brain,” says Lecun.  

“Geoff Hinton certainly deserves the greatest credit for many of the ideas that have made current deep learning possible,” says Bengio, who is a professor at the University of Montreal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. “I assume this also makes him feel a particularly strong sense of responsibility in alerting the public about potential risks of the ensuing advances in AI.”

MIT Technology Review will have more on Hinton throughout the week. Be sure to tune in to Will Douglas Heaven’s live interview with Hinton at EmTech Digital on Wednesday, May 3, at 13.30 Eastern time. Tickets are available from the event website.