Duo win Physics Nobel Prize for ‘foundational’ AI breakthroughs

US scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for discoveries and inventions in machine learning that paved the way for the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
The pair’s research on neural networks in the 1980s paved the way for technology that promises to revolutionise society but has also raised apocalyptic fears.
Hinton has been widely credited as a “godfather” of AI and made headlines when he quit his job at Google last year to be able to more easily speak about the dangers of the technology he had pioneered.
“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Hinton said over the phone to the Nobel press conference, speaking from a hotel in California.
“It’s going to be wonderful in many respects, in areas like healthcare,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences. Particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
Hopfield, 91, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.
“When you get systems that are rich enough in complexity and size, they can have properties which you can’t possibly intuit from the elementary particles you put in there,” he said in a press conference convened by Princeton. “You have to say that system contains some new physics.”
He echoed Hinton’s concerns, saying there was something unnerving about the unknown potential and limits of AI.
“One is accustomed to having technologies which are not singularly only good or only bad, but have capabilities in both directions,” he said.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it awarded the prize to the two men because they used “tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning” that is “revolutionising science, engineering and daily life”.
The award comes with a prize sum of 11mn Swedish crowns ($1.1mn) which is shared by the two winners.
British-born Hinton, 76, now professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and carry out tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures, the academy said. – Reuters/AFP