Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.
Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian researcher known as The Godfather of AI whose findings have helped spark a technological revolution, has won the Nobel Prize in physics.
The prize was awarded to Hinton, who has spent most of his career at the University of Toronto, together with a Princeton University researcher, John Hopfield, for their work in laying the foundations that allow machine learning using artificial neural networks.
“I’m excited. I had no idea this would happen,” Hinton said when reached by the Nobel committee by phone on Tuesday.
Ellen Moons, a member of the committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two winners “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that act as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets .”
He said that such networks have been used to develop research in physics and “have also become part of our everyday lives, for example in face recognition and language translation.”
While the committee honored the science behind artificial intelligence, Moons also talked about its flip side.
“While machine learning has huge benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future,” he said.
“Together, humans bear the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greater good of mankind.”
Hinton shares those concerns. He gave up a role at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
Hinton, now 76, said he continues to worry “about a number of potential bad outcomes” of his machine learning work, “especially the threat of these things getting out of control.”
Still, he said, he would do it all again.
The physics prize includes a financial award of 11 million Swedish kronor, or about C$1.45 million, from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
In the 1980s, Hinton helped develop a technique called backpropagation, which has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”
In 2012, his team at the University of Toronto won the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition by designing a technique that could recognize images far better than any of their competitors.
One of the team’s two graduate students, Ilya Sutskever, is a co-founder of OpenAI and is credited as one of the architects of the company’s wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT.
Hinton said he uses the chatbot himself.
“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I’m going to ask GPT4,” Hinton told the Nobel announcement, referring to the latest model of the chatbot.
“I don’t fully trust him, because he can illusions, but on almost everything, he’s not a very good expert. And that’s very helpful.”
Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award, computer science’s top prize.
Born in London, UK, Hinton joined the U of T computer science department as a professor in 1987. He left in 1998 to set up a computational neuroscience unit at University College London, but returned in 2001 and is now an emeritus professor.
In a statement, U of T president Meric Gertler said he was delighted with the news of Hinton’s award.
“The U of T community is extremely proud of his historic achievement,” he said.
This report was first published by The Canadian Press on October 8, 2024.
— With files from The Associated Press.
(Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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