Nobel Prize: AI pioneers win Nobel Prize in Physics

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning That is revolutionizing the way we work and live, but it also creates new threats to humanity. Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Great Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American who works at Princeton.

“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Mark Pearce, a member of the Nobel physics committee.

The artificial neural networks – interconnected computing nodes inspired by the neurons in the human brain – pioneered by the researchers are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives,” said Ellen Moons, of the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Sciences.

Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton’s, told The Associated Press: “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had.”

Hinton predicted that AI will eventually have an “enormous influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and healthcare.

“It would be comparable to the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open conference with journalists and officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it will be wonderful in many ways,” Hinton said.

“But we also have to worry about a number of potential negative consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Warning of AI Risks The Nobel committee also cited fears about the possible downside.

Moons said that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans have a responsibility to use this new technology in a safe and ethical manner for the greatest benefit of humanity.”

Hinton, who resigned from a position at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create, shares those concerns.

“I’m concerned that the overall consequence of this could be that systems smarter than us eventually take over,” Hinton said.

For his part, Hopfield, who signed the first petitions from researchers calling for strong control of technology, compared the risks and benefits of working with viruses and nuclear energy, capable of helping and harming society. At a news conference in Princeton, he touched on concerns, mentioning the dystopia imagined in George Orwell’s “1984,” or the fictional apocalypse inadvertently created by a Nobel-winning physicist in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.”

None of the winners were home to receive the call. Hopfield, who was staying with his wife at a cabin in Hampshire, England, said that after having coffee and getting a flu shot, he opened his computer to find a flurry of activity.

“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, he added, but he doubted there were any other physicists in town who would join in the celebration.

Hinton said he was surprised by the honor.

“I’m dumbfounded. I had no idea this would happen,” he said when contacted by the Nobel committee by phone. He said he was in a cheap hotel with no internet.

Hinton’s work is considered “the birth” of AI Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation, instrumental in training machines to “learn” by adjusting errors until they disappear. It is similar to the way a student learns, with an initial solution graded and faults identified and returned for repair. This process continues until the response matches the network’s version of reality.

Hinton had an unconventional background as a psychologist who also dabbled in carpentry and was genuinely curious about how the mind works, said his protégé Nick Frosst, who was Hinton’s first employee at Google’s artificial intelligence division in Toronto.

I think his “joy and genuine interest in answering fundamental questions are key to his success as a scientist,” Frosst said.

He also didn’t stop at his pioneering work of the 1980s.

“He’s been constantly trying crazy things and some of them work really well and some of them don’t,” Frosst said. “But they have all contributed to the success of the field and have encouraged other researchers to try new things as well.”

Hinton’s team at the University of Toronto wowed their peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That spawned a flood of imitators and was “a very, very significant moment in retrospect and in the course of the history of AI.” ” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.

“Many people consider this to be the birth of modern AI,” he said.

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was stupid,” Hinton told the AP in 2019. “My message to young researchers is: Don’t be discouraged if everyone tells you what you’re doing. “

Many of Hinton’s former students and collaborators followed him into the tech industry as he began to capitalize on AI innovations, and some founded their own AI companies, including Frosst’s Cohere and OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. Hinton said he uses machine learning tools in his daily life.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to something, I just go and ask GPT-4,” Hinton said in the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust him because he can cause hallucinations, but he’s a not very good expert in almost everything. And that’s very useful.”

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

Just as Hinton came to the field from psychology, Hopfield emphasized that cutting-edge science emerges from crossing the boundaries of scientific fields such as physics, biology, and chemistry rather than researchers staying in their lane. That’s why this prize is a physics prize, he said, noting that his neural network borrows from condensed matter physics.

With large, complex problems in scientific fields, “if you’re not motivated by physics, you just don’t tackle those kinds of problems,” Hopfield said.

While there is no Nobel for computer science, Li said awarding a traditional science prize to AI pioneers is significant and shows how the boundaries between disciplines have been blurred.

Disagreement over the risks of AI Not all of their peers agree with the Nobel laureates about the risks of the technology they helped create.

Frosst has had many “lively debates” with Hinton about the risks of AI and disagrees with some of Hinton’s warnings, but not with his willingness to address them publicly.

“We mainly disagree on the time scale and the particular technology that is sounding the alarm about,” Frosst said. “I don’t think neural networks and language models as they exist today pose an existential risk.”

Bengio, who has long sounded the alarm about the risks of AI, said what really alarms him and Hinton is the “loss of human control” and whether AI systems will act morally when they are smarter than the humans.

“We don’t know the answer to these questions,” he said. “And we should make sure we do that before we build those machines.”

When asked whether the Nobel committee could have taken Hinton’s warnings into account when deciding on the prize, Bengio dismissed it, saying, “We’re talking about very early work when we thought everything would be rosy.”

Six days of Nobel announcements began Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. They continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Economics Prize on October 14.

The prize includes a cash endowment of 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million) from a legacy left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The winners are invited to receive their awards at a ceremony to be held on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.