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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to ‘Godfather of AI’

Writer's picture: ParlayMeParlayMe

Updated: Oct 10, 2024



Geoffrey Hinton who warned AI could wipe out humanity was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.


The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the 2024 Nobel prize in Physics that went to American scientists John Hopfield and British Geoffrey Hinton for their work on machine learning techniques by developing artificial neural networks and the underlying algorithms that allow machines to learn, which is what we mean today when we talk about Artificial Intelligence.


Two researchers who helped lay the foundations for modern artificial intelligence – although one later warned of its potential harms – have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physics.

Inspired by the workings of the brain, John Hopfield, a US professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, built artificial neural networks that store and retrieve memories like the human brain, and learn from information fed into them.


John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton both worked on machine learning techniques that would go on to power products such as ChatGPT.


But Professor Hinton is notable also for his opposition to those technologies. Last year, he resigned from Google after a decade so that he freely warn about the “existential risk” posed by the technology.


The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden announced on Tuesday that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to American scientists John Hopfield and British Geoffrey Hinton for their work on machine learning techniques by developing artificial neural networks and the underlying algorithms that allow machines to learn, which is what we mean today when we talk about artificial intelligence.

 

Hopfield is a professor at Princeton University in the United States, while Hinton is a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada. The projects that the Nobel laureates worked on are key to models of artificial intelligence, big data, and modern software such as ChatGPT.

 

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel Prize Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said that the laureates


“used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that act as associative memory and find patterns in large data sets.”

While AI has not been a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Physics, the discovery of neural networks that can learn and their applications are closely related to physics, Moons said:


“These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research in various physics topics, such as particle physics, materials science, and astrophysics.”

Applications of the technology include many early approaches to AI, such as providing computer programs with logical rules to help solve problems.


Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to "learn."


His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.


Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.


Hinton used Hopfield's network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.

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