Who Are the Godfathers of AI? Hinton, Bengio and LeCun Explained

Three computer scientists shared the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning after knowing each other for close to forty years. They now disagree in public about where AI is heading. The godfathers of AI are Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, the three computer scientists who shared the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning. Hinton popularised the training method behind almost every large AI model, Bengio’s language research fed into the transformer behind ChatGPT, and LeCun developed the convolutional network that taught computers to see. In March 2019 the Association for Computing Machinery announced that its 2018 A.M. Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing, would go jointly to the three men for their work on deep learning. Deep learning trains artificial neural networks, software loosely modelled on the brain and built from many stacked layers of simple connected units, to find patterns in data. ACM’s announcement noted that their efforts to revive interest in neural networks were at first met with scepticism. The press often calls them the godfathers of AI. The three were honoured together again in 2025, when the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering went to seven pioneers of modern machine learning. That group…