Geoffrey Hinton

“The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.”

“The NSA is already bugging everything that everybody does. Each time there's a new revelation from Snowden, you realise the extent of it.”

“I had a stormy graduate career, where every week we would have a shouting match. I kept doing deals where I would say, 'Okay, let me do neural nets for another six months, and I will prove to you they work.' At the end of the six months, I would say, 'Yeah, but I am almost there. Give me another six months.'”

“The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules.”

“Take any old classification problem where you have a lot of data, and it's going to be solved by deep learning. There's going to be thousands of applications of deep learning.”

“Deep learning is already working in Google search and in image search; it allows you to image-search a term like 'hug.' It's used to getting you Smart Replies to your Gmail. It's in speech and vision. It will soon be used in machine translation, I believe.”

“In science, you can say things that seem crazy, but in the long run, they can turn out to be right. We can get really good evidence, and in the end, the community will come around.”

“All you need is lots and lots of data and lots of information about what the right answer is, and you'll be able to train a big neural net to do what you want.”

“In A.I., the holy grail was how do you generate internal representations.”

“In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.”

“Humans are still much better than computers at recognizing speech.”

“A deep-learning system doesn't have any explanatory power.”

“My father was an entomologist who believed in continental drift. In the early '50s, that was regarded as nonsense. It was in the mid-'50s that it came back. Someone had thought of it 30 or 40 years earlier named Alfred Wegener, and he never got to see it come back.”

“In a sensibly organised society, if you improve productivity, there is room for everybody to benefit.”

“Now that neural nets work, industry and government have started calling neural nets AI. And the people in AI who spent all their life mocking neural nets and saying they'd never do anything are now happy to call them AI and try and get some of the money.”

“We now think of internal representation as great big vectors, and we do not think of logic as the paradigm for how to get things to work. We just think you can have these great big neural nets that learn, and so, instead of programming, you are just going to get them to learn everything.”

“We want to take AI and CIFAR to wonderful new places, where no person, no student, no program has gone before.”

“The role of radiologists will evolve from doing perceptual things that could probably be done by a highly trained pigeon to doing far more cognitive things.”

“My view is we should be doing everything we can to come up with ways of exploiting the current technology effectively.”

“Irony is going to be hard to get. You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don't get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.”