Geoffrey Hinton has a hunch about what's next for AI

Back in November, the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-century's worth of attempts--some wildly successful--he'd arrived at another promising insight into how the brain works and how to replicate its circuitry in a computer. "It's my current best bet about how things fit together," Hinton says from his home office in Toronto, where he's been sequestered during the pandemic. If his bet pays off, it might spark the next generation of artificial neural networks--mathematical computing systems, loosely inspired by the brain's neurons and synapses, that are at the core of today's artificial intelligence. His "honest motivation," as he puts it, is curiosity. But the practical motivation--and, ideally, the consequence--is more reliable and more trustworthy AI.