- John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton were awarded Nobel Physics Prize for their fundamental work in artificial intelligence.
- Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, is a double citizen of Canada and the UK, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton University.
- According to Mark Pierce, a member of the Nobel Committee on Physics, Hopfield and Hinton laid the foundations for the machine learning revolution.
Two pioneers in artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton, won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday.
Hinton, known as the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence, is a Canadian and British citizen working at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
“These two gentlemen were truly pioneers,” said Mark Pierce, a member of the Nobel Physics Committee. “They did the basic work… based on the physical understanding that led to the revolutions we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
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Artificial neural networks – interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain – pioneers have been used throughout science and medicine, and for example facial recognition and language translation have become part of our daily lives,” said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
This photo shows Professor John Hopfield of Princeton University at the University of Toronto on October 8th, 2024, Professor John Hopfield of Princeton University, Professor John Hopfield on the left, and Professor John Hopfield of 2024 Nobel Prize winners. (via Princeton University AP and Noah Burger/AP Photos)
“I’m continuing to be amazed at the impact it has had,” Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the foundation for Hintons, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Hinton predicted that AI would have a “major impact” on civilization, resulting in improved productivity and healthcare.
“It would rival the Industrial Revolution,” he said in a public call with reporters and officials at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Instead of surpassing people in physical fitness, we’re going to surpass people in intellectual capacity. We’ve never had experience of having something smarter than us, and that’s going to be great in many ways,” Hinton said.
“But we also need to worry about a number of possible bad outcomes, especially the threat of these things getting out of control.”
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The Nobel Committee also mentioned fears about the possibility of flipside.
“While it has brought great benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans are responsible for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the best interests of humanity.”
Hinton shares these concerns. He left his role at Google, allowing him to speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he created.
John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton, as seen in the photo, were announced at a press conference on October 8, 2024 by Hans Elerglen, secretary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)
“I’m worried that the overall outcome of this could be a more intelligent system than we ultimately control,” Hinton said.
On his part, Hopfield, who signed an early petition for strong control of technology, compared the risks and benefits of machine learning to tackle viruses and nuclear energy that can support society and harm.
Neither winner was at home to make a call
Neither winner was at home when they received the news. Hopfield, who was staying with his wife in a cottage in Hampshire, England, said he opened his computer to the surge in activity after grabbing coffee and taking shots of the flu.
“I’ve never seen that many emails in my life,” he said. A bottle of champagne and a bowl of soup were waiting for him on his desk, he added, but he doubted that there would be a fellow physicist in town to take part in the celebration.
Hinton said he was shocked by the honor.
“I was surprised. I didn’t think this would happen,” he said when he called the Nobel Committee. He said he was in a cheap hotel with no internet.
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Hinton’s work is considered the “birth” of AI
Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique known as backpropagation in the 1980s. This has been dedicated to the training machine to “learning” by tweaking until the error disappears. This is similar to how students learn from teachers, with the initial solution being graded in stages, and the defects are identified, fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the reality version of the network.
His team at the University of Toronto surprised his peers in 2012 by winning the prestigious Image Net Computer Vision Competition using neural networks. That victory was “a very important moment in the history of hindsight and AI,” said Stanford computer scientist and image Creett fei-fei li.
“Many people think that this is the birth of modern AI,” she said.
Artificial intelligence pioneer Jeffrey Hinton will speak at a crash conference held in Toronto on June 19, 2024. (Canadian press via Chris Young/AP, file)
Hinton and fellow AI scientists Joshua Bengio and Jan Lekun received the Turing Award, the top prize in computer science in 2019.
“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told the Associated Press in 2019.
“My message to young researchers is, if everyone tells you that what everyone is doing is ridiculous, don’t put off.”
And he said Hinton himself uses machine learning in his daily life.
“Whenever I want to know the answer to something, I go to the GPT-4 and ask,” Hinton said in the Nobel announcement. “I don’t completely trust it because I can hallucinate it, but it’s not a very good expert on almost everything. It’s very useful.”
Hopfield’s work was the foundation of Hinton.
Hopfield, 91, created associative memory that allows images of data and other types of patterns to be stored and reconstructed, the Nobel Committee said.
“What captivates me the most is this question of how the mind comes from the machine,” Hopfield said in a video posted online by the Franklin Institute after winning the 2019 Physics Prize.
Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the basis for a new network using another method known as the Boltzmann machine.
The Nobel Prize Medal will be exhibited before the ceremony on December 6th, 2021 at the Swedish Ambassador’s residence in London. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)
Teached by Hinton, “deeply shaped” by Hopfield’s thinking, Bengio said that both the winners “see what is not clear: see the connection between physics and neural network learning.”
He said he was “really pleased” that they had won the award. “It’s great for this field. It’s great for recognizing its history.”
The six-day Nobel announcement took place on Monday, and Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Lubukun received medical awards for discovering small genetic material that acts as small switches within cells that could lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.
The award will receive a $1 million cash award from the bequest left by the award creator Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners will be invited to receive the award at the ceremony on December 10th, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
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Nobel’s presentation will continue his literary awards on Wednesday and Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, and the Economics Prize will be announced on October 14th.
