Hinton doesn't work at Google anymore. Nor did the longtime professor at the University of Toronto do his pioneering research at the tech giant.
Neural network advances came from “basic, curiosity-driven research,” Hinton said at a press conference after his win. “Not out of throwing money at applied problems, but actually letting scientists follow their curiosity to try and understand things.” Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, said Wednesday his dream was to model his research laboratory on the “incredible storied history” of Bell Labs. Started in 1925, the New Jersey-based industrial lab was the workplace of multiple Nobel-winning scientists over several decades who helped develop modern computing and telecommunications.
By the time the sleep-deprived scientist reached the Google campus in nearby Mountain View, he “seemed pretty lively and not very tired at all” as colleagues popped bottles of champagne, said computer scientist Richard Zemel, a former doctoral student of Hinton’s who joined him at the Google party Tuesday.
An hour before the party, Hinton used his Nobel bully pulpit to throw shade at OpenAI during opening remarks at a virtual press conference organized by the University of Toronto in which he thanked former mentors and students.Asked to elaborate, Hinton said OpenAI started with a primary objective to develop better-than-human artificial general intelligence “and ensure that it was safe.”
But Kearns, who sits on the committee that picks the winners of computer science's top prize — the Turing Award — said this week marks a “great victory for interdisciplinary research” that was decades in the making.