His former students have now been poached by Silicon Valley to lead AI research at the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google (which has also appointed him a vice president engineering fellow). Hinton is a pioneer of something called machine learning which enables computers to come up with programmes to solve problems themselves. In particular, he has devised a subset of machine learning called "deep learning" whereby neural networks modelled on those that form the human brain enable machines to learn in the same way a toddler does. Through the work of Hinton and his colleagues – dubbed by their rivals the "Canadian Mafia" – the potential of machine learning has become limitless.