Google Scholars numbers are horrible and should never be relied on. It is extremely easy game its citation numbers, and its crawls too wide and find to many false positive citations.

Judging someone by how many citations they have is like saying The Pope is right about everything because millions of cardinals and priests will refer to his proclamations in their masses.

Should we be normalizing by the number of years that they've been actively publishing?

On that basis Sutskever and He are both above Hinton, for example.