Geoffrey Hinton

I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain. That is the goal I have been pursuing. We are making progress, though we still have lots to learn about how the brain actually works. ”

In the long run, curiosity-driven research just works better... Real breakthroughs come from people focusing on what they're excited about. ”

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

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. ”

The paradigm for intelligence was logical reasoning, and the idea of what an internal representation would look like was it would be some kind of symbolic structure. That has completely changed with these big neural nets. ”

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. ”

Early AI was mainly based on logic. You're trying to make computers that reason like people. The second route is from biology: You're trying to make computers that can perceive and act and adapt like animals. ”

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

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. ”

My main interest is in trying to find radically different kinds of neural nets. ”