Sargent’s team discovered new ingredients for making ethylene by using new AI and supercomputer-driven techniques that have been gaining popularity among materials scientists in the past decade.Ted Sargent uses electrical setups like these to chemically upgrade carbon dioxide into useful materials at the University of Toronto.

According to the most popular modern Bayesian account, the brain is an “inference engine” that seeks to minimize “prediction error.”In 2001, Hinton left London for the University of Toronto, where he became one of the most important figures in artificial intelligence, laying the groundwork8 for much of today’s research in deep learning.8 In 2012, Hinton won the ImageNet Challenge, a competition to identify objects in a 15-million-image database built by Fei-Fei Li. ImageNet helped propel neural networks—and Hinton—to the forefront of AI.Before Hinton left, however, Friston visited his friend at the Gatsby one last time.