The research that won Geoffrey Hinton a Nobel Prize for physics was the product of plenty of work carried out before artificial intelligence was the buzzword it is today.
The British-Canadian computer scientist and other AI pioneers say his now-celebrated discoveries dating back to the 1980s attracted doubters and a fraction of the attention AI sees today.
While Hinton remembers many of his research efforts as fun, he says it was “slightly annoying” that several people were skeptical of some his theories.
He says these skeptics thought neural networks, which are models that mimic the human brain by recognizing patterns and making decision based on data, were a waste of time and would never be able to learn complicated things.
Yoshua Bengio, a fellow Canadian computer scientist who won the A.M. Turing Award with …