Two groundbreaking figures in the field of artificial intelligence, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the fundamental building blocks of machine learning, The Associated Press reports.
The Nobel committee lauded their contributions, saying that their research has revolutionized the way we live and work, leading to breakthroughs in various fields like science and medicine.
“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. “They were the persons who did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding, which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Hinton, widely recognized as the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”, is a citizen of Canada and Britain and currently works at the University of Toronto. Hopfield, an American, is affiliated with Princeton University.
Their work with artificial neural networks has had a profound impact on modern society.
While acknowledging the immense benefits of AI, both Hinton and the Nobel committee have expressed concerns about its potential downsides.
Hinton, who has voiced his concerns about the dangers of AI, even left his role at Google to more freely speak out about the technology he helped create.
Hinton’s research in the 1980s led to the development of backpropagation, a technique that revolutionized the training of machines to “learn”. It involves fine-tuning errors until they disappear, similar to how students learn from teachers by correcting mistakes. His team at the University of Toronto later achieved a major breakthrough in 2012 when they used a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition, sparking a wave of similar research and accelerating the rise of modern AI. Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun received computer science’s highest honor, the Turing Award, in 2019.
Hopfield, at 91, developed an associative memory capable of storing and reconstructing images and other patterns within data. Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network, the Boltzmann machine, which can identify characteristic elements within specific types of data.
The Nobel Prize in Physics carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s founder, Alfred Nobel. The laureates will receive their awards at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
