AI pioneers win Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions to machine learning

• John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their seminal work in artificial intelligence.
• Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, is a dual citizen of Canada and Britain and Hopefield is an American working at Princeton University.
• According to Mark Peirce, a member of the Nobel Physics Committee, Hopfield and Hinton laid the foundation for the machine learning revolution.

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live, but humanity Is also creating new threats for.

Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a Canadian and British citizen who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American who works at Princeton.

“These two gentlemen were truly pioneers,” said Mark Pearse, a member of the Nobel Physics Committee. “He … did fundamental work based on physical understanding that led to the revolution in machine learning and artificial intelligence that we see today.”

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Artificial neural networks – interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain – have been pioneered by researchers, are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives, for example facial recognition and in language translation,” said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“I’m amazed at the impact it has had,” Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Hinton predicted that AI would have a “huge impact” on civilization, improving productivity and health care.

“It would be the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open conversation with journalists and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Hinton said, “Instead of surpassing people in physical strength, it’s going to be surpassing people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to make things smarter than us. And it is in many ways It’s going to be amazing.”

“But we also have to worry about a lot of potential bad outcomes, especially the risk of these things getting out of control.”

Warning of AI risks

The Nobel Committee also noted fears about a possible reversal.

Moons said that although it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans must harness this new technology in a safe and ethical manner for the greatest benefit to mankind.” Take responsibility for using it.”

Hinton shares those concerns. He left a role at Google so he could talk more openly about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, pictured, have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, it was announced by Hans Ellergren, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden on October 8. 2024. (Christine Olson/TT News Agency via AP)

“I worry that the overall result of this may be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton said.

For his part, Hopfield, who signed early petitions by researchers calling for stronger control of the technology, compared the risks and benefits of machine learning to work on viruses and nuclear energy, which could both help and harm society. Are capable of.

No winner was home to take the call

None of the winners were at home when they received the news. Hopfield, who was living with his wife at a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after drinking coffee and getting a flu shot, he opened his computer and saw a lot of activity.

“I’ve never seen so many emails in my life,” he said. A bottle of champagne and a bowl of soup were waiting for him on his table, he said, but he doubted there were any fellow physicists in town to join the festivities.

Hinton said he was stunned by the honor.

“I’m surprised. I didn’t know this would happen,” he said in a phone call with 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 called backpropagation in the 1980s that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn” errors until they disappear. This is similar to how a student learns from a teacher, in which the initial solution is graded and flaws are identified and repaired by fixing them. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.

His team at the University of Toronto later surprised peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win sparked a flurry of imitators and “was a very important moment in subsequent AI history,” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.

“Many people consider this the birth of modern AI,” he said.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton speaks at the Collision conference in Toronto on June 19, 2024. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press, via AP, file)

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was bullshit,” Hinton told the AP in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very wonderful thing for obviously intelligent people to waste their time on.”

“My message to young researchers is, don’t be discouraged if everyone tells you what they are doing is stupid.”

And Hinton himself uses machine learning in his daily life, he said.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to something, I go and ask GPT-4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t trust it completely because it can cause hallucinations, but it’s not a very good expert on almost everything. And it’s very useful.”

Hopefield’s work was the foundation for Hinton.

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

“The thing that fascinates me most is still the question of how a machine comes to have a mind,” Hopfield said in a video posted online by the Franklin Institute after being awarded the physics prize in 2019.

Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation of a new network that uses a different method, known as a Boltzmann machine, that the committee said would identify specific elements in a given type of data. Can learn to recognize.

The Nobel Prize medal is displayed before a ceremony at the Swedish Ambassador’s residence in London on December 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

Bengio, who was advised by Hinton and was “deeply shaped” by Hopfield’s thinking, told the AP that both winners “saw something that was not obvious: the connection between physics and learning in neural networks, which underlies modern Has been the basis of AI.”

He said he was “really happy” that he won the award. “It’s great for the area. It’s great to recognize that history.”

Six days of Nobel announcements began on Monday when Americans Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun won the medicine prize for the discovery of tiny pieces of genetic material that act as on and off switches inside cells that may one day prevent diseases such as cancer. Can lead to powerful treatment for.

The prize carries a cash prize of $1 million from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

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The Nobel announcement continues with chemistry awards on Wednesday and literature awards on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 14.