Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024 for his work on artificial neural networks. He is often called the Godfather of AI for co-developing the backpropagation algorithm in the 1980s. Hinton's work, shared with co-laureate John Hopfield, laid the foundational discoveries that enabled the current explosion of machine learning. The backpropagation algorithm provided an efficient method for training multi-layer neural networks, allowing the