---
id: "2019-03-27-turing-award-deep-learning"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-03-27-turing-award-deep-learning/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2019-03-27"
date_precision: day
category: milestone
importance: 3
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-03-27-turing-award-deep-learning/

# Hinton, LeCun and Bengio receive the Turing Award for deep learning

The ACM awarded the 2018 A.M. Turing Award to Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, the 'godfathers of deep learning', for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.

## Key facts
- Announced 27 March 2019 (the 2018 award)
- Prize: $1 million, funded by Google
- Recognized work on backpropagation, CNNs, and neural language models

## What happened

Computing's highest honor went to the three researchers who kept neural networks alive through the 'AI winters'.

## Why it matters

Signaled the complete mainstream acceptance of deep learning within computer science.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [ACM: 2018 Turing Award](https://awards.acm.org/about/2018-turing) (awards.acm.org, official)
2. [Wikipedia: Turing Award](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award) (en.wikipedia.org, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2024-10-08: [Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton](https://postcutoff.com/e/2024-10-08-nobel-physics-hopfield-hinton/index.md)
- 1986-10-09: [Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams popularize backpropagation](https://postcutoff.com/e/1986-10-09-backpropagation/index.md)
- People: [Geoffrey Hinton](https://postcutoff.com/person/geoffrey-hinton/), [Yann LeCun](https://postcutoff.com/person/yann-lecun/), [Yoshua Bengio](https://postcutoff.com/person/yoshua-bengio/)