This is Geoff Hinton.

Because of a back condition, he hasn't been able

to sit down for more than 12 years.

I hate standing, I would much rather sit down,

but if I sit down I have a disc that comes out.

So. Okay.

Well, at least now standing desks are fashionable and--

Yeah, but I was ahead.

(laughs)

I was standing when they weren't fashionable.

Since he can't sit in a car or on a bus,

Hinton walks everywhere.

(playful music)

The walk says a lot about Hinton and his resolve.

For nearly 40 years, Hinton has been trying

to get computers to learn like people do.

A quest almost everyone thought was crazy,

or at least hopeless.

Right up until the moment it revolutionized the field.

Google thinks this is the future of the company.

Amazon thinks this is the future of the company.

Apple thinks it's future of the company.

My own department thinks this stuff's probably nonsense

and we shouldn't be doing any more of it.

(laughs)

So, I talked everybody into it except my own department.

(playful music)

You obviously grew up in the UK,

and you had this very prestigious family

full of famous mathematicians and economists

and, I was curious what that was like for you.

Yeah, there was a lot of pressure.

I think by the time I was about seven,

I realized I was gonna have to get a Ph.D.

(laughing)

Did you rebel against that?

Or you went along with it?

I dropped out every so often.

I became a carpenter for a while.

Geoff Hinton pretty early on became obsessed

with this idea of figuring out how the mind works.

He started off getting into physiology,

the anatomy of how the brain works,

then he got into psychology, and then finally,

he settled on more of a computer science approach

to modeling the brain, and got into artificial intelligence.

My feeling is, if you want to understand

a really complicated device like a brain,

you should build one.

I mean, you can look at cars,

and you could think you could understand cars.

When you try to build a car, you suddenly discover

then there's this stuff that has to go under the hood,

otherwise it doesn't work.

Yeah. (laughs)

As Geoff was starting to think about these ideas,

he got inspired by some AI researchers across the pond.

Specifically, this guy: Frank Rosenblatt.

Rosenblatt, in the the late 1950s,

developed what he called a perceptron,

and it was a neural network, a computing system

that would mimic the brain.

The basic idea is a collection

of small units, called neurons.

These are little computing units,

but they're actually modeled on the way

that the human brain does it's computation.

They take their incoming data like we do from our senses,

and they actually learn, so the neural net

can learn to make decisions over time.

Rosenblatts's hope was that you could feed

a neural network a bunch of data,

like pictures of men and women,

and it would eventually learn how to tell them apart.

Just like humans do.

There was just one problem: it didn't work very well.

Rosenblatt, his neural network was the single layer

of neurons, and it was limited in what it could do.

Extremely limited.

And a colleague of his wrote a book in the late 60s

that showed these limitations.

And, it kind of put the whole area of research

into a deep freeze for a good 10 years.

No one wanted to work in this area.

They were sure it would never work.

Well, almost no one.

It was just obvious to me that everything

was about ready to go.

The brain's a big neural network,

and so, it has to be that stuff like this can work,

because it works in our brains.

There's just never any doubt about that.

And what do you think that it was inside of you

that kept you wanting to pursue this

when everyone else was giving up?

Just, that you thought it was the right direction to go?

No, that everyone else was wrong.

Okay.

(laughs)

(upbeat music)

Hinton decides he's got an idea

of how these neural nets might work,

and he's going to pursue it no matter what.

For a little while, he's bouncing around

research institutions in the US.

He kind of gets fed up that most of them

were funded by the Defense Department,

and he starts looking for somewhere else he can go.

I didn't want to take Defense Department money.

I sort of didn't like the idea that this stuff

was going to be used for purposes

that I didn't think were good.

He suddenly hears that Canada might be interested

in funding artificial intelligence.

And that was very attractive,

that I could go off to this civilized town,

and just get on with it.

So I came to the University of Toronto.

And then in the mid-80s, we discovered

how to make more complicated neural nets

so they could solve those problems

that the simple ones couldn't solve.

He and his collaborators developed

a multi-layered neural network, a deep neural network.

And this started to work in a lot of ways.

Using a neural network, a guy named

Dean Pomerleau built a self-driving car in the late 80s.

And it drove on public roads.

Yann LeCun, in the 90s, built a system

that could recognize handwritten digits,

and this ended up being used commercially.

But again, they hit a ceiling.

(upbeat music)

It didn't work quite well enough,

because we didn't have enough data,

we didn't have enough compute power.

And people in AI and computer science,

decided that neural networks

were wishful thinking, basically.

So, it was a big disappointment.

Through the 90s, into the 2000s,

Geoff was one of only a handful of people on the planet

who were still pursuing this technology.

He would show up at academic conferences

and be banished to the back rooms,

he was treated as, really like a pariah.

Was there like a time when you thought

this just wasn't going to work?

And you had some self-doubt?

I mean there were many times when I thought,

"I'm not going to make this work."

(laughs)

But Geoff was consumed by this and couldn't stop.

He just kept pursuing the idea

that computers could learn.

Until about 2006, when the world catches up

to Hinton's ideas.

(upbeat music)

Computers are now a lot faster.

And now, it's behaving like I thought

it would behave in the mid-80s.

It's solving everything.

The arrival of super-fast chips,

and the massive amounts of data produced on the internet

gave Hinton's algorithms a magical boost.

Suddenly, computers could identify what was in an image.

Then, they could recognize speech

and translate from one language to another.

By 2012, words like neural nets and machine learning

were popping up on the front page

of the New York Times.

You have to go all these years,

and then all of a sudden, in a the span of a few months,

it just takes off.

Did it finally feel like aha,

the world has finally come to my vision?

It was sort of a relief that people

finally came to their senses.

(laughs)

(gentle music)

For Hinton, this was clearly a redemptive moment

after decades of toil.

And for Canada, it meant something even bigger.

Hinton and his students put the country on the map

as an AI superpower,

something no one, and no computer,

could ever have predicted.