In the past when AI has been overhyped—including backpropagation in the 1980s—people were expecting it to do great things, and it didn’t actually do things as great as they hoped. Today, it’s already done great things, so it can’t possibly all be just hype.
EMERITUS DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO VICE PRESIDENT & ENGINEERING FELLOW, GOOGLE
Geoffrey Hinton is sometimes known as the Godfather of Deep Learning, and he has been the driving force behind some of its key technologies, such as backpropagation, Boltzmann machines, and the Capsules neural network. In addition to his roles at Google and the University of Toronto, he is also Chief Scientific Advisor of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
MARTIN FORD: You’re most famous for working on the backpropagation algorithm. Could you explain what backpropagation is?
GEOFFREY HINTON: The best way to explain it is by explaining what it isn’t. When most people think...