A Google AI 'godfather' says machines could match human abilities in 5 years

Geoffrey Hinton splits his time between Google and academia. Hinton, known as the godfather of "deep learning," said the most powerful machines are still about a million times smaller than the human brain. They only have the equivalent of around a billion synapses (the connections between the neurons in the brain), compared to 1,000 trillion in the human brain. But machines are becoming more sophisticated every year. When asked to predict how long it will take before machines possess human-level abilities, Hinton said: "More than five years. I refuse to say anything beyond five years because I don't think we can see much beyond five years."