Geoffrey Hinton has not publicly announced that he has quit Google. As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, he was still listed as a Distinguished Researcher at Google Brain, the company’s artificial intelligence research division.
However, there have been reports in the media that Hinton has scaled back his involvement with Google and is focusing more on his work at the University of Toronto. This may be due to his desire to spend more time on academic research and teaching, as he has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1987 and has supervised many graduate students in the field of AI.
It’s also worth noting that Hinton has been critical of some aspects of the tech industry’s approach to AI, particularly the reliance on large amounts of labelled data to train machine learning models. In a 2019 interview with the New York Times, he expressed concern that this approach was not sustainable and that it would eventually lead to diminishing returns in terms of AI progress. It’s possible that Hinton’s views on these issues have influenced his decision to focus more on academic research rather than industry work.
