Artificial intelligence pioneers win tech’s ‘Nobel Prize’

This undated photo provided by Mila shows Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and scientific director at the Artificial Intelligence Institute in Quebec. Bengio was among a trio of computer scientists whose insights and persistence were rewarded Wednesday, March 26, 2019, with the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as technology industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. It comes with a $1 million prize funded by Google, a company where AI has become part of its DNA. (Maryse Boyce/Mila via AP)

SAN FRANCISCO: Computers have become so smart during the past 20 years that people don’t think twice about chatting with digital assistants like Alexa and Siri or seeing their friends automatically tagged in Facebook pictures. 

But making those quantum leaps from science fiction to reality required hard work from computer scientists like Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. The trio tapped into their own brainpower to make it possible for machines to learn like humans, a breakthrough now commonly known as “artificial intelligence”, or AI.