Harvard will confer five honorary degrees at its 375th Commencement on Thursday, honoring three men and two women in a lineup that includes AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, journalist Peggy Noonan and comedian Conan O’Brien.
The university’s honorary degree recipients also include Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, a British historian and scholar of early modern Europe and the Balkans, Harvard Magazine said. The guest speaker has traditionally been recognized as the final degree recipient, and the magazine identified O’Brien as this year’s speaker.
For Hinton, the recognition comes after a career that helped define modern artificial intelligence. The Britain-born computer scientist earned his B.A. in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. He won the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries that made machine learning using artificial neural networks possible.
Hinton, now distinguished professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto, resigned from Google in 2023 so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI. He has warned that it is hard to see how bad actors can be prevented from using the technology for harmful purposes, and said he does not think developers should scale it up further until they understand whether it can be controlled.
Malcolm brings a different kind of record to Harvard’s stage. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford since 2002 and spent a year at Harvard in 1999 during the Kosovo war, a detail that ties this year’s ceremony to the university’s broader international reach.
The five honorary degrees are part of Harvard’s 375th Commencement, and the mix of honorees reflects a university choosing to celebrate not only public fame but also influence in scholarship, journalism and technology. The tension in this year’s list is plain: one of the world’s leading AI researchers is being honored just as he is publicly pressing the risks of the field he helped build.
That makes Thursday’s ceremony more than a ceremonial formality. It will put Harvard’s highest academic pageant in conversation with one of the defining debates of the moment — how to honor innovation while the people driving it are warning that the consequences may already be running ahead of control.
