Scientists Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto and John Hopfield of Princeton University have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks, he said Tuesday the awarding body.
British-born Hinton spent the last decade dividing his time between teaching computer science at the University of Toronto and working for Google’s deep learning artificial intelligence team, before announcing his resignation from the Alphabet company in 2023.
“I’m stunned,” Hinton told the panel by phone at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. “I had no idea this would happen. I’m very surprised.”
Canadian-British artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says he left Google because of recent discoveries about artificial intelligence that made him realize it poses a threat to humanity. CBC Chief Correspondent Adrienne Arsenault talks to the “godfather of artificial intelligence” about the risks involved and whether there is a way to avoid them.
Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two winners “have used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets “.
He said such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for example in facial recognition and language translation.”
Hopfield created associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the academy said.
Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in images, he added.
The work of the two prize winners was closely connected. In an interview with News Network this morning, Hinton said that, in fact, one of his most influential mentors was one of Hopfield’s students, Terry Sejnowski, who worked with him on his “most exciting research” on how to make more general “Hopfield networks”.
Artificial intelligence could become “smarter than us”: Hinton
Hinton said he believes the effects of advances in artificial intelligence will be comparable to those of the industrial revolution, leading to large productivity gains and offering efficiencies through the development of AI assistants that will help in many areas, including providing care healthcare.
“It’s going to be amazing, and that’s why progress won’t be stopped. I don’t think we’ll be able to hit the pause button on AI because there will be so many huge benefits,” he told CBC News. “But we really need to worry about how to keep it under control.”
As he has warned since leaving Google, there could be unintended consequences from the advancement of artificial intelligence technologies that can write its own computer code.
“We have no experience of what it means to have things smarter than us,” he said Tuesday while in California.
Hinton has accumulated numerous previous accolades, earning the prestigious AM Turing Award for contributions to computer science. That same year he was named a Companion of the Order of Canada for developing “learning algorithms that allow computers to recognize speech, interpret images and find structures in complex data sets.”
He joined the U of T faculty in 1987 and was a consultant at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Asked if he had a favorite online AI tool, Hinton said he often used OpenAI’s GPT-4, although he admitted: “I don’t completely trust it, because it can hallucinate.”
The Nobel Prizes come with a cash prize of 11 million Swedish crowns (1.44 million Canadian dollars), which is divided among the winners if more than one person is awarded.
The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The winners are invited to receive their prizes during ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
The Sunday magazine11.36pmDoes the ‘Godfather of Artificial Intelligence’ think he’s created a monster?: ‘A little. YES’
In a wide-ranging interview with host Robyn Bresnahan, Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist who left his post at Google this month to raise the alarm about artificial intelligence’s threat to humanity, says he knows who is scaring people with his predictions. He hopes to scare politicians into doing something. For the rest of us, it offers some hope: Humanity has already survived some major threats, like nuclear weapons, but only by taking them seriously and getting to work.
The physics prize comes a day after two American biologists, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of microRNAs.
The Nobel announcements will continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and that for economics on October 14.
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