Geoffrey Hinton at U of T’s St. George campus. Photo by Nick Iwanyshyn.
The University of Toronto is proud to announce that it has established the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence, made possible by $10 million in funding from Google.
This new chair will honour the extraordinary legacy of University Professor Emeritus and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton at U of T and Google by enabling the university to recruit and retain another brilliant, internationally recognized AI expert to make profound contributions to the field.
“On behalf of the university, I would like to express our deepest gratitude to Google for this wonderful investment,” said Melanie A. Woodin, University of Toronto president. “This new chair will enable us to build on Geoff Hinton’s historic contributions in artificial intelligence and to advance our record of transformational research in fields of crucial importance to the world.”
U of T is matching Google’s support with an additional $10 million in funding. This historic $20-million investment makes the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence one of the University of Toronto’s most prestigious and generously supported advanced research roles, with substantial endowed support for a leading-edge AI researcher and additional funds to drive fundamental discoveries and insights — creating the intellectual underpinnings necessary to take AI to the next level.
“Google is proud to partner with the University of Toronto in establishing this endowed chair, recognizing the extraordinary impact of Geoff Hinton, whose Nobel Prize-winning work laid the foundation for modern artificial intelligence,” said Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research. “On a personal level, it was a delight to have Geoff as a colleague for more than a decade. This chair will empower world-class academic scholars to accelerate breakthrough innovations and drive responsible research that shapes a future where AI serves a common good.”
The Hinton Chair is the first in the university’s newly developed Third-Century Chairs program, a strategic effort established on the cusp of U of T’s bicentennial to attract and retain visionary scholars who can transform disciplines, shape global discussions, improve lives and strengthen Canada’s capacity to prosper. With competition for talent at an all-time high, the program will help the university amass critical expertise in areas essential to the country’s future — a key priority shared by the Canadian government, which recently announced a $1.7-billion commitment to attract top global research talent.
The Hinton Chair will also help U of T recruit, teach and train some of the world’s most talented students in the field, fuelling innovation in AI applications across medicine, engineering, discovery science, the humanities and more, expanding the university’s AI networks and international partnerships and sparking a new wave of promising AI startups.
Building on Hinton’s revolutionary research
The Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence aims to support the same brilliant, exploratory research that its namesake has pursued during his time at the University of Toronto and at Google.
After receiving his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978 and completing several years of postdoctoral work in the United Kingdom and the United States, Geoffrey Hinton came to the University of Toronto in 1987 as a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). There, along with several graduate students, he accelerated his expansive work on artificial neural networks as a potential pathway for advancing AI, developing core concepts such as: backpropagation algorithms; distributed representations; time-delay neural nets; mixtures of experts, variational learning and deep learning; and, most famously, Boltzmann machines.
In the 2000s, Hinton’s ideas began to yield extremely promising results. In March 2013, as more tech companies recognized the promise of artificial neural networks, Hinton joined Google as a vice president and engineering fellow, where he would stay for the next decade, splitting his time between the company and U of T.
Although many people have contributed to the current state of AI, arguably none was more important than Hinton, whose decades-long research forms the foundation of modern artificial intelligence and its myriad applications across nearly every discipline and sector. He is also responsible for the “Hinton effect,” which saw many of his students go on to lead AI advances in universities and companies across the globe.
“I am grateful for having been able to pursue my research at the University of Toronto, which afforded me the time and resources to develop the ideas that would eventually grow into the success of neural nets,” said Geoffrey Hinton. “I am encouraged that the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence will support the next generation of AI research in the same vein, allowing ideas of great promise to germinate for the benefit of all humanity.”
Together with John J. Hopfield, Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024 for his foundational work in enabling deep learning and propelling the field to its current peak.
University of Toronto — a world leader in AI
Based at the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Computer Science — ranked 12th in the world according to the 2025 QS World University Rankings by Subject and a global leader in deep learning and generative AI — the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence will leverage U of T’s and Toronto’s substantial and widely recognized strengths in AI.
“It’s thrilling to consider the astonishing possibilities of welcoming a globally leading AI researcher into this setting,” said Interim Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science Stephen Wright. “At the Department of Computer Science, the chair-holder will be surrounded by a remarkable concentration of scientific knowledge and creative skills, and a deep, proven track record of research excellence. It’s an ideal platform for charting new pathways and pursuing breakthrough discoveries in our shared goal of a brighter technological future for all.”
The University of Toronto is home to CIFAR AI Chairs and Canada Research Chairs in AI and has spurred several cutting-edge AI startups such as BlueDot (infectious disease intelligence), Waabi (autonomous trucks) and Deep Genomics (RNA-focused AI for disease detection). In addition to Hinton’s Nobel Prize, U of T’s faculty members and graduates have earned many other distinctions, including two Turing Awards, two of the three Herzberg Gold Medals ever awarded to computer scientists, and 15 Sloan Research Fellowships.
The university also consistently attracts and trains the best and most diverse cohort of undergraduate and graduate students from around the world, with hundreds pursuing AI-related studies across the university.
In addition, U of T is home to an array of AI-focused research initiatives such as the Acceleration Consortium, the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, the Data Sciences Institute and the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine. The university also maintains a close partnership with the Vector Institute, a globally renowned organization co-founded by Geoffrey Hinton that empowers researchers, businesses and governments to develop and adopt AI responsibly.
An impactful partnership: Google and U of T
Establishing the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence is the latest instance of U of T and Google’s longtime partnership in supporting discovery-based research. Over the years, Google has engaged many AI-focused U of T alumni and academic leaders, including Hinton, and the two organizations are founding partners in Toronto’s Vector Institute. Previous funding from Google has helped position the University of Toronto as a preeminent centre for advanced research in AI, and this new chair will greatly expand this impact.
“We are extremely grateful to Google for partnering with us to establish a chair dedicated to cutting-edge research on the defining technology of our time, which will help generate societal and economic benefits for communities across the planet,” said David Palmer, U of T vice-president, advancement. “Hinton himself once said that real breakthroughs come from people focusing on what they’re excited about, and the Hinton Chair will honour this example by providing unprecedented support for the next era of elemental, curiosity-driven work in artificial intelligence.”
— Original story by the University of Toronto
