Two pioneers of artificial intelligence, John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton, are creating machine learning building blocks that will not only revolutionize the way we work and live, but also pose new threats to humanity. was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for his contributions to .
Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a Canadian and British national who works at the University of Toronto, while Hopfield is an American who works at Princeton University.
“These two gentlemen were truly pioneers,” said Mark Pearce of the Nobel Committee for Physics. “They… 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) pioneered by researchers are used in all fields of science and medicine, including “facial recognition, language translation, and other It has become part of our daily lives,” said Ellen Moons. Member of the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
This photo shows the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics winners, Professor John Hopfield (left) of Princeton University and Professor Jeffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto (taken on October 8, 2024). (Princeton University, Associated Press and Noah Berger/AP Photo)
Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the foundation for Hinton, told The Associated Press on Tuesday: “I continue to be amazed at the amount of impact that work has had.”
Hinton predicted that AI would eventually have a “huge impact” on civilization, leading to improvements in productivity and healthcare.
“It will be comparable to the industrial revolution,” he said in a public call with reporters and officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“You don’t surpass people physically, you surpass people intellectually. We’ve never experienced what it’s like to have things smarter than we are, and in many ways It’s going to be great,” Hinton said.
“But we also have to worry about the many bad outcomes that could happen, especially the threat that these things get out of control.”
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The Nobel Committee also noted concerns about the possibility of flipping.
Mr. Moons said that while technology has “enormous benefits, its rapid development also raises concerns about our future. Collectively, we believe that we must use this new technology safely and in the best interest of humanity.” We have a responsibility to use it in an ethical manner.”
Hinton shares those concerns. He left his position at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped develop.
John Hopfield and Jeffrey Hinton, pictured, will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, it was announced on October 8th at a press conference at the Hans Ellergren Center, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden. Ta. 2024. (Kristin Olson/TT News Agency, via AP)
“I’m concerned that the overall result of this is that ultimately systems more intelligent than us will take control,” Hinton said.
Hopfield signed an early petition from researchers calling for stronger control over the technology, and raised the stakes of applying machine learning to viruses and nuclear power, which can help or harm society. compared the benefits.
Neither winner was home to receive the call.
Neither winner was home when they received the news. Hopfield, who was staying with his wife in a holiday home in Hampshire, England, said he drank coffee, got a flu shot, then opened his computer and got busy.
“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 desk, but he added that he thought there might be some fellow physicists in town who would join in the celebration.
Hinton said she was shocked by the honor.
When he received a phone call from the Nobel committee, he said, “I’m surprised. I never expected something like this to happen.” He said he was in a cheap hotel with no internet.
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Hinton’s research is considered the “birth” of AI
Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique known as backpropagation in the 1980s. This technology helped train machines how to “learn” by tweaking them until the errors disappear. This is similar to how students learn from their teachers, where their initial solutions are graded, deficiencies are identified, and returned to be corrected and remediated. This process continues until the answer matches the real-world version of the network.
His team at the University of Toronto then surprised his colleagues by winning the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012 using a neural network. The win spawned a slew of imitators and “in hindsight, it was a hugely important moment in the evolution of AI history,” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator. Feifei Li said.
“Many people think this is the birth of modern AI,” she says.
Artificial intelligence pioneer Jeffrey Hinton speaks at the Collision Conference in Toronto on June 19, 2024. (Chris Young/Canadian Press via AP, File)
Hinton and fellow AI scientists Joshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won the Turing Award, computer science’s highest award, in 2019.
“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told The Associated Press in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided and that what we were doing was a very surprising thing that would be wasted on seemingly intelligent people.” Their time is fixed. ”
“My message to young researchers is, don’t be discouraged if everyone says what you’re doing is stupid.”
Hinton himself uses machine learning in his daily life.
“When you want to know the answer to something, you just go to GPT-4 and ask,” Hinton said when announcing the Nobel Prize. “I don’t completely trust it because it can cause hallucinations, but I’m not a very good expert on almost everything, and it’s very helpful.”
Hopfield’s research served as the basis for Hinton’s
The Nobel committee said Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.
“What intrigues me the most is still how we learn from machines,” Hopfield said in a video posted online by the Franklin Institute after it was awarded the 2019 Physics Prize. The question is, can a heart be born?”
Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the basis for a new network that uses a different method known as a Boltzmann machine. The committee said Boltzmann machines can learn to recognize distinctive elements of certain types of data.
A Nobel Prize medal is displayed before the ceremony at the Swedish ambassador’s residence in London on December 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)
Bengio, who was mentored by Hinton and “deeply shaped” by Hopfield’s thinking, said both winners “found something that wasn’t obvious: physics and is the basis of modern AI. “We saw a connection to learning in neural networks,” he told The Associated Press.
He said he was “really happy” that they had won the award. “It’s great for the site, and it’s great to recognize its history.”
Six days of Nobel Prize announcements began on Monday, with Americans Victor Ambrose and Gary Lubukun receiving the medical prize for their discovery of tiny pieces of genetic material that act as on-off switches in cells, potentially leading to cancer and other diseases. It opened with the possibility that it could lead to a powerful treatment for the disease.
The prize comes with $1 million in cash from a bequest left by the prize’s founder, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners will be invited to receive their prizes at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
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The Nobel Prize announcements will be followed by the Chemistry Prize on Wednesday, followed by the Literature Prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, and the Economics Prize will be announced on October 14th.
