Meet the Man Google Hired to Make AI a Reality

Geoffrey Hinton was in high school when a friend convinced him that the brain worked like a hologram. To create one of those 3-D holographic images, you record how countless beams of light bounce off an object and then you store these little bits of information across a vast database. While still in high school, back in 1960s Britain, Hinton was fascinated by the idea that the brain stores memories in much the same way. Rather than keeping them in a single location, it spreads them across its enormous network of neurons. This may seem like a small revelation, but it was a key moment for Hinton -- "I got very excited about that idea," he remembers.