Google's AI Guru Wants Computers to Think More Like Brains

In the early 1970s, a British grad student named Geoff Hinton began to make simple mathematical models of how neurons in the human brain visually understand the world. Artificial neural networks, as they are called, remained an impractical technology for decades. But in 2012, Hinton and two of his grad students at the University of Toronto used them to deliver a big jump in the accuracy with which computers could recognize objects in photos. Within six months, Google had acquired a startup founded by the three researchers. Previously obscure, artificial neural networks were the talk of Silicon Valley.