Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the “Godfather of AI,” and physicist John Hopfield received the Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for their groundbreaking work on the foundations of artificial intelligence.
The pair’s study on neural networks in the 1980s cleared the door for technology that promised to revolutionize civilization, but has also generated apocalyptic concerns.
“In the same circumstances, I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” British-Canadian Hinton, 76, told reporters via a phone interview after the announcement.
Hinton aroused eyebrows in 2023 when he quit his employment at Google to warn of the technology’s “profound risks to society and humanity”.
In March of last year, when asked if AI could wipe out mankind, Hinton said, “It’s not impossible.”
The panel recognized the team for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, stated at a news conference that these instruments have become a part of our daily life, including facial recognition and language translation.
While praising AI’s promise, Moons acknowledged that “its rapid development has also raised concerns about our collective future.”
“Humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way,” she said.
Hopfield, a 91-year-old American professor at Princeton University, was spotlighted for having created the “Hopfield network,” also known as associative memory, which can be used to “store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.”
Word of the award reached Hopfield “at a thatched cottage where he is staying in England,” Princeton University said in a press release.
“My wife and I went out to get a flu shot and stopped to get a coffee on the way back home,” Hopfield was quoted as saying.
Upon returning they were met by “a pile of emails” that he described as “astounding” and “heartwarming,” according to the statement.
‘Exceed people’s intellectual ability’
The jury said Hinton, a 76-year-old professor at the University of Toronto, used the Hopfield network as a foundation for a new network: “the Boltzmann machine”.
Hinton was credited with inventing “a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.”
“I’m flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen,” Hinton told reporters in a phone interview as the laureates were announced in Stockholm.
Hinton said he was an avid user of AI tools such as ChatGPT, and said he believed the technology will have “a huge influence.”
“It will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability,” Hinton said.
“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us, and it’s going to be wonderful in many respects, in areas like healthcare,” he said.
Nobel season
The Physics Nobel Prize is the second of the season, following the Medicine Prize, which was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun on Monday.
The US trio was honored for discovering microRNA and its significance in gene regulation.
The Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, honor those who, in the words of prize creator and scientist Alfred Nobel, “conferred the greatest benefit on humankind”.
Last year, France’s Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-Austrian Ferenc Krausz, and Franco-Swede Anne L’Huillier received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work utilizing ultra-fast light flashes to examine electrons inside atoms and molecules.
The physics prize will be followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday, with the highly anticipated literary and peace prizes being announced on Thursday and Friday, respectively.
The economics prize concludes the 2024 Nobel season on October 14.
The winners will receive their prize, which includes a diploma, a gold medal, and a $1 million check, from King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of physicist Alfred Nobel, who established the prizes in his will.