Today Google announced an investment that looks to the future of the field Geoffrey Hinton helped create: CAD $10 million to establish the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto. It's a gesture to honor his legacy and to support the fundamental research that propelled modern neural networks.

What Google announced

Google is providing CAD $10M to create the Hinton Chair in AI at the University of Toronto. The aim is to recruit visionary academics dedicated to curious, foundational research—the same mindset that defined Hinton's career.

The announcement comes after Hinton's recognition with the Nobel Prize and highlights the link between his academic work and the decade he spent at Google, where his ideas helped shape the AI we use every day.

Why this matters?

First: the University of Toronto is a historic hotbed for neural network development. Do you remember how tools like voice recognition, image search, and automatic translation suddenly got so much better? Much of that progress was born in universities like Toronto.