AI pioneers John Hopfield, Geoffrey Hinton win Nobel prize

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics on October 8 for helping to create the constituent elements of automatic learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live, but also creates new threats to humanity, said one of the winners.
Mr. Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Great Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Mr. Hopfield is an American working in Princeton.
“The two winners of the Nobel Prize this year in physics have used physics tools to develop methods that are the basis of the powerful automatic learning today,” the Nobel Committee said in a press release.
Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said that the two winners “used fundamental concepts of statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that work as associative memories and find models in large sets of data”.
She said such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also been part of our daily life, for example in facial recognition and linguistic translation.
Mr. Hinton predicted that AI will eventually have a “enormous influence” on civilization, providing improvements in productivity and health care.
“It would be comparable to the industrial revolution,” he said during the open call with journalists and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Instead of overcoming people in physical strength, this will exceed people with intellectual capacity. We have no experience of what it is to have more intelligent things than us. And it will be wonderful in many ways,” said Hinton. “But we also have to worry about a number of bad possible consequences, in particular the threat of these things that become uncontrollable.”
The Nobel Committee which honored science behind automatic learning and AI also mentioned the fears concerning its possible. Moons said that even if she had huge advantages, her rapid development also expressed her concerns about our future. Collectively, humans are responsible for using this new technology safely and ethical to the greatest advantage of humanity. ”
Mr. Hinton shares these concerns. He left a role in Google so that he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped to create.
On October 8, he said he was shocked by honor.
“I am amazed. I had done it, no idea that it would happen,” he said when he was reached by the Nobel Committee on the phone.
There was no immediate reaction from Mr. Hopfield.
In the 1980s, Mr. Hinton helped develop a technique known as the narrowing that played a decisive role in the training of “learning” machines.
His team at the University of Toronto then seduced his peers by using a network of neurons to win the prestigious imagenet Computer Vision competition in 2012. This victory generated a burst of copycates, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.
Mr. Hinton and his AI scientific colleagues, Yoshua Bengio and Yann Lecun, won the first IT prize, The Turing Award, in 2019.
“For a long time, people thought that the three of us were doing was a nonsense,” Hinton told the Associated Press in 2019. “They thought we were very wrong and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for the apparently intelligent people to waste their time. My message to young researchers is, don’t reject you if everyone tells you.”
Mr. Hopfield has created an associative memory that can store and rebuild images and other types of models in data, said the Nobel Committee.
“What fascinates me the most is always this question of how the mind comes from the machine,” said Hopkins in a video published online by the Franklin Institute after he awarded him a physics prize in 2019.
Mr. Hinton used Mr. Hopfield’s network as the basis of a new network which uses a different method, known as Boltzmann Machine, which, according to the Committee, can learn to recognize the characteristic elements in a given type of data.
Six days of Nobel ads opened on Monday with the Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the price of medicine for their discovery of small pieces of genetic material which serve as switches on cells inside the cells which help to control what the cells do and when they do. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases such as cancer.
The price of physics has a cash price of 11 million Swedish Kronor ($ 1 million) of a legacy left by the creator of the Prize, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The winners are invited to receive their awards during ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Mr. Nobel’s death.
Nobel announcements continue with the price of physics in chemistry on October 9 and literature on October 10. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 11 and the economy prize on October 14.
This story was reported by the Associated Press.