The reason hidden units in neural nets are called hidden units is that Peter Brown told me about hidden Markov models. I decided "hidden" was a good name for those extra units, so that's where the name "hidden" comes from.

— Geoffrey Hinton, Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks (2000)

On naming 'hidden neurons', from the 2000 oral history Talking Nets.

Topics: artificial intelligence