SAN DIEGO — The University of Toronto will recruit a top-tier AI researcher to lead a scientific group with a $20-million budget, half of that donated by Google in recognition of deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton.

The holder of the new Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence will work to make AI breakthroughs, and apply the technology to areas like medicine, engineering and scientific discoveries. Google and U of T announced the new position on the sidelines of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in San Diego on Wednesday evening.

Hinton is “one of the most important scientists of our time,” said Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google’s DeepMind and Research divisions, adding “those are going to be big shoes to fill for whoever is in there, but it will really help encourage academic research.”

The donation continues a long association between Hinton, Google and U of T. In Toronto, Hinton, his collaborators and students did critical work to advance the field of deep learning. At NeurIPS in December 2012, Hinton and two of his students presented a paper showing that their preferred approach of neural networks could classify images much better than other kinds of AI systems. 

Google hired the three computer scientists shortly afterwards, beating out Baidu, DeepMind and Microsoft in an auction to acquire their shell startup. In March 2013, Hinton joined the tech giant’s Brain AI unit half-time as a distinguished researcher, contributing to further advances in how AI models are trained. 

Hinton quit Google in May 2023, saying he wanted to speak more freely about the risks of AI. He has since become one of the most prominent voices warning that the technology could soon be smarter than humans and must be controlled to avoid dire consequences. Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics last year for his contributions to the field of AI.

Researchers trained at U of T have played significant roles at both Google Brain and DeepMind, which Google later bought. They include Hugo Larochelle, who led Brain in Montreal before becoming scientific director of the Mila AI institute in September, as well as Vlad Mnih, who led early DeepMind breakthroughs. Scores of U of T graduate and doctoral students have also interned at the two AI units during their degrees. 

AI professors at the school who have worked with Google include computer vision researcher David Fleet and cognitive science researcher Will Cunningham. U of T has also recruited former Google researchers to its faculty, including responsible AI researcher Feng Ji and chemistry researcher Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling.

Dean said Hinton’s legacy includes the students he trained. “They’ve all gone on to do amazing things as well.” While large firms are making breakthrough AI advances on their own today, academia can educate people in the process of training research, Dean said.

While Canadian university researchers regularly collaborate with U.S. tech giants, Silicon Valley firms have not directly endowed many academic research positions in Canada. In October, Google pledged $1 million to the University of Waterloo for a new position focused on the future of work and learning. 

U of T will match Google’s funding for the Hinton chair. Federal funding delivered via the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research has helped universities around the country recruit and retain top AI researchers. The Liberals’ 2025 budget committed $1 billion to help pay for 1,000 new research positions. Canadian schools are particularly keen to recruit international experts leaving or avoiding the U.S. in response to President Donald Trump’s immigration measures and cuts to science funding. 

Hinton himself left the U.S. for Canada for political reasons in the late 1980s, citing his opposition to military funding of AI research.

Update: This story has been updated with comments from Google’s Jeff Dean.