6.2 Americas — Godfathers and Giants

Godfathers and Giants: How America created deep learning and became the theater of the AI race

During the winters of artificial intelligence — those periods when no one believed — three researchers persisted. Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto. Yoshua Bengio in Montreal. Yann LeCun in New York. They were nicknamed the "godfathers of deep learning."

In 2019, they received the Turing Prize — the "Nobel of computing." In 2024, Hinton received the actual Nobel Prize in Physics. The obstinate ones had transformed the world.

Then came the giants. OpenAI launched ChatGPT — one hundred million users in two months. Anthropic proposed safer AI. Google, Meta, Microsoft entered the race. Training costs reached hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the godfathers also became prophets of concern. Hinton resigned from Google to sound the alarm freely. Bengio advocates for global governance. The joy of creating mingles with the anguish of what is created.

Further south, Latin America leapt forward. Forty percent AI adoption. Argentina saved seventy-two billion liters of water through smart irrigation. Brazil applied AI to agriculture.

The Americas created deep learning — and the questions it poses.