The Nobel Prize was recently awarded to Geoffrey Hinton for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). It sparked controversyand reveals a deeper issue of how society rewards innovation. While Hinton is celebrated for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence and his popularization of back propagation, critics, including AI expert Jürgen Schmidhuber, argue that the award ignores Foundational contributions of Paul Werbos and Shun-ichi Amari, two figures whose pioneering work decades ago provided the foundation for modern neural networks. Werbos’s 1974 doctoral thesis and Amari’s model of adaptive learning, 1972 These were crucial starting points, but their efforts have been largely overshadowed by the emergence of later figures such as Hinton.
The Nobel Prize – the highest honor in science – should recognize the full range of contributions. The omission in Hinton’s case reflects a broader misunderstanding of creativity itself. The myth of the lone genius, often embodied by figures such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, dominates public narratives, leading us to believe that great achievements occur in isolation. In fact, most progress comes as a result of cumulative and collaborative efforts. While Hinton’s credit is well-deserved, it highlights a common flaw in how credit is distributed: the contributions of early pioneers often fade from view when the spotlight falls on those who build on their work.
This is not a problem unique to artificial intelligence. The history of technology is full of similar stories. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone from scratch. The iPhone was the product of incremental innovations in smartphones, just as the Macintosh borrowed heavily from innovations developed at Xerox PARC. Jobs’ brilliance lies in improving these technologies, making them intuitive and accessible to the masses. As Jobs himself admitted, “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” alluding to the fact that innovation often involves improving existing ideas rather than creating something completely new.
Elon Musk’s association with Tesla provides another clear example. Musk joined Tesla in 2004, years after it was founded by Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning. While Musk is often credited with revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry, electric vehicles have been around for more than a century. Musk’s genius did not lie in inventing electric cars, but in turning the concept into a desirable, scalable, and profitable product. Tesla’s success did not come from invention, but from continuous implementation and improvement, pushing the boundaries in battery technology and autonomous driving.
This dynamic is central to Silicon Valley, where companies routinely build on existing ideas and take them to new heights. Facebook (now known as Meta) did not invent social networking, MySpace and Friendster had already created the category. Google wasn’t the first search engine, AltaVista and others had been around long before that. What made Facebook and Google successful was their ability to refine these concepts and scale them to a global level. The true power of Silicon Valley lies not in creating completely new technologies, but in improving and expanding existing technologies.
Artificial intelligence follows a similar path. Hinton’s work was pivotal, but it stood on the shoulders of previous research. Werbus and Amari’s contributions were crucial to the development of neural network technologies that would later support breakthroughs such as AlphaGo and OpenAI’s GPT. These technologies did not emerge from nothing, but are the result of decades of incremental progress. Focusing too much on individual personalities distorts the reality of technological progress, which is almost always a multi-layered, collaborative process.
This brings us to a basic truth about innovation: being the first to develop an idea is just as important as being the one to improve, scale, and effectively implement it. Innovation is not about individual genius, it is about collective progress. When we give credit only to the most visible figures, we miss the contributions of those who laid the foundation for breakthroughs.
The controversy surrounding Hinton’s Nobel Prize should lead to a re-evaluation of how we perceive creativity. The foundational work of Werbos and Amari deserves greater credit, as their early efforts were crucial to enabling Hinton’s progress. Innovation is rarely the product of one person’s genius, but rather a collaborative journey built on incremental improvements over time.
Looking to the future, the most important advances in artificial intelligence and other technologies will likely not come from those who invent entirely new concepts, but from those who can improve upon existing ideas and adapt them to meet new challenges. Tesla’s success was not in making the electric car, but in turning it into something desirable, scalable and practical. Apple’s victory wasn’t about inventing the smartphone or the personal computer, it was about making them accessible and indispensable.
True innovation is not measured by where an idea starts, but by how it evolves, improves, and transforms industries. The innovators we celebrate should include not only those who promote ideas, but also those who lay the foundations for these achievements. Only by acknowledging this broader network of contributors can we fully appreciate how progress truly happens.
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