Geoffrey Hinton's 2013 Auction and Challenges | Generated by AI
First, a quick correction: The person’s name is Geoffrey Hinton (often called the “Godfather of AI”), not Geffrey.
Age in 2013 and the Auction
Geoffrey Hinton was born on December 6, 1947. In 2013, specifically around March when the auction for his startup DNNresearch took place, he was 65 years old (he turned 66 later that year in December).
The event you’re referring to was indeed a high-profile auction in early 2013. Hinton, along with his University of Toronto graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, had founded DNNresearch to commercialize their deep neural network technology. This followed their breakthrough win in the 2012 ImageNet competition with AlexNet, which kickstarted the modern AI boom. The auction attracted bids from major tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and reportedly DeepMind (though DeepMind was acquired by Google the following year). Google ultimately won with a bid of around $44 million, acquiring DNNresearch and bringing Hinton on board part-time while he continued teaching. This deal did make him a significant fortune, marking a pivotal moment in his career and the AI field.
Personal Challenges
Yes, Hinton has openly discussed dealing with chronic back pain for much of his life, which stems from a condition that makes sitting for extended periods difficult—he often stands or lies down during work and interviews. He’s mentioned this in various profiles, noting it influenced his lifestyle and even his decision to avoid long flights or certain commitments. Regarding a “hard life,” Hinton’s path wasn’t always smooth: He faced skepticism in the AI community during the “AI winters” of the 1980s and 1990s when neural networks fell out of favor, leading to funding struggles and professional isolation. He persisted through that, emigrating from the UK to Canada in the 1980s partly due to ethical concerns over military funding for AI research. On a personal note, he lost his first wife to cancer in the 1990s, which was a profound hardship. Despite these, he’s had a long, influential academic career since the 1970s.
Comparison to Yitang Zhang
There’s a fair parallel here, though with some differences. Yitang Zhang, a mathematician, gained sudden public fame in 2013 at age 58 for his groundbreaking proof on bounded gaps between prime numbers (showing that there are infinitely many pairs of primes differing by at most 70 million). Before that, he lived a relatively obscure life, working odd jobs (like at a Subway sandwich shop) after his PhD due to academic job market struggles and lack of connections. His success came late, after years of quiet, solitary work.
Hinton’s trajectory is similar in that his widespread public recognition exploded in his mid-60s around 2012–2013, with the deep learning renaissance making him a household name in tech. However, unlike Zhang, Hinton was already a respected figure in AI academia for decades—he co-invented backpropagation in the 1980s and had been pushing neural nets through periods of doubt. His “late-life” fame was more of a resurgence and amplification to the broader public, tied to commercial AI applications, rather than a complete emergence from obscurity. Both stories highlight perseverance paying off later in life, often after personal and professional hurdles.
If you meant something specific about “back panic problem” (perhaps a typo for back pain or panic attacks?), I interpreted it as his well-known back issues, but let me know if it’s something else.
References:
Geoffrey Hinton - Wikipedia
How Google Bought Deep Learning Startup DNNresearch For Millions - Business Insider
Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build - MIT Technology Review
Yitang Zhang - Wikipedia
The Lone Genius Who Proved the Twin Prime Conjecture - Quanta Magazine