Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hinton resigned from Google in May 2023 to freely speak out about the risks of AI without having to consider the impact on Google. He announced his departure in an interview published in The New York Times on the 1st of May 2023 and said a part of him regrets his life's work.
Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with John Hopfield, for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. The Nobel citation explicitly mentioned his development of the Boltzmann machine, which he co-invented with David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski in 1985.
Hinton co-authored a highly cited 1986 paper with David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams that popularized the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks. Hinton credited Rumelhart as the originator of the core idea, noting in a 2018 interview that "David Rumelhart came up with the basic idea of backpropagation, so it's his invention."
AlexNet was an image-recognition system designed by Hinton and his graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge in 2012. Its performance was a breakthrough in computer vision and drew wide industry attention. Hinton, Krizhevsky, and Sutskever subsequently co-founded DNNresearch Inc., which Google acquired in March 2013 for $44 million.
Hinton has warned about catastrophic misuse by bad actors, including AI-assisted creation of lethal viruses. He has also raised concerns about technological unemployment, the need for universal basic income, and existential risk from AGI. By December 2024, he estimated a ten to twenty percent chance that AI would cause human extinction within three decades.
Notable former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from Hinton's group include Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun, Alex Graves, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Yee Whye Teh, Zoubin Ghahramani, Richard Zemel, Brendan Frey, Radford M. Neal, Max Welling, Sam Roweis, and Peter Dayan.