Artificial intelligence trailblazers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their foundational work in machine learning, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.
Hopfield, 91, an American researcher at Princeton University, and Hinton, 76, a British-Canadian scientist at the University of Toronto, were recognized for developing methods that form the basis of today’s powerful machine learning systems.
“This year’s laureates have used tools from physics to create the building blocks of modern artificial intelligence,” said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee. “Their work has not only advanced research in physics but has become integral to our daily lives, from facial recognition to language translation.”
Hinton, often referred to as the “Godfather of AI,” played a crucial role in developing backpropagation, a technique instrumental in training machines to learn. His team’s victory in the 2012 ImageNet computer vision competition sparked a revolution in AI development.
“I’m flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen,” Hinton said when reached by the Nobel committee.
Hopfield’s contribution includes creating an associative memory that can store and reconstruct patterns in data. Hinton built upon this work to develop the Boltzmann machine, a network that can learn to recognize characteristic elements in data sets.
While celebrating AI’s potential, both laureates and the Nobel committee acknowledged the technology’s risks. Hinton, who recently left his role at Google to speak more freely about AI’s dangers, compared its impact to the Industrial Revolution.
“It’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability,” Hinton said. “We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. It’s going to be wonderful in many respects, but we also have to worry about possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million). The laureates will be invited to receive their awards at ceremonies in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
