Geoffrey Hinton · Yann LeCun · Yoshua Bengio
Backpropagation in practice (Hinton, 1986). Convolutional neural networks (LeCun, 1989). Modern deep learning, AlexNet (with Krizhevsky and Sutskever, 2012), the architectures that became GPT and everything after.
Spent thirty years working on neural networks while the field considered them dead. Got the last laugh in 2012 when AlexNet won ImageNet by a margin so large the field instantly pivoted. Hinton resigned from Google in 2023 to "speak freely" about AI risk; LeCun runs Meta AI; Bengio runs Mila in Montréal.
""We were the only people studying neural nets, because everyone else thought they didn't work." — Hinton, on the 1990s."
Three of them. One of them — Hinton — credits his stubbornness to "being descended from George Boole, on his mother's side". (He is.)