Hinton was only technically an intern at Google. He arrived that summer for what he describes as a trial run -- he was hesitant to leave Toronto, where he has lived with his family for most of the past quarter-century -- and the short-term stint didn't have any other obvious job title. But in the manner of an intern, Hinton still seems chuffed to find himself quite where he is. On a recent morning at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, the first thing he did was enumerate the riches of one of many well-stocked "micro-kitchens." His job is to rove among one of the company's most highly valued teams, seeding the work underway with ideas.

Often they involve more than one. In December, Microsoft-owned Skype unveiled a demo version of a real-time translation service. As one caller speaks English or Spanish, the program renders it in the other language, in both spoken and written form. The U of T computer science department website hosts a version of a tool that many industry players are racing to perfect: upload a picture, and it generates a written caption. At a CIFAR talk in March, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, now a U of T professor, showed that the model is eerily accurate -- but not always.