STOCKHOLM (AP) — Two artificial intelligence pioneers — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in Physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that are revolutionizing the way we work and live, but also create 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 truly the pioneers,” said Mark Pearce, Nobel Prize in Physics member.
The artificial neural networks – interconnected computing nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain – that the researchers pioneered are used in science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives,” says Ellen Moons of the Nobel Committee of the European Union Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Sciences.
Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the foundation for Hinton’s, told The Associated Press: “I never cease to be amazed at the impact it has had.”
Hinton predicted that AI will eventually have a “tremendous impact” on civilization, improving productivity and healthcare.
“It would be comparable to the industrial revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“We have no experience with what it’s like to have things smarter than we are. And it’s going to be great in many ways,” Hinton said.
“But we also have to worry about some possible bad consequences, especially the threat of these things spiraling out of control.”
AI Risk Warning
The Nobel Committee also mentioned fears about the possible downside.
Moons said that while it has “huge benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, people bear the responsibility to use this new technology in a safe and ethical manner for the greatest benefit of humanity.”
Hintonwho left a position at Google to speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create, shares those concerns.
“I worry that the overall consequence of this could be that systems that are more intelligent than us end up taking control,” Hinton said.
For his part, Hopfield, who signed early petitions from researchers calling for strong control over the technology, compared the risks and benefits of working on viruses and nuclear energy, which can help and harm society. At a press conference in Princeton, he alluded to the concerns and brought up the dystopia imagined in George Orwell’s “1984,” or the fictional apocalypse accidentally created by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.”
Neither winner was home to receive the call
Hopfield, who was staying with his wife in a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after grabbing a coffee and getting his flu shot, he opened his computer to 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 ready, he added, but he doubted any fellow physicists in town would attend the celebration.
Hinton said he was shocked by the honor.
“I’m stunned. I had no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by telephone by the Nobel Committee. He said he was in a cheap hotel without internet.
Hinton’s work is considered “the birth” of AI
Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique known as backpropagation in the 1980s, which helps train machines to “learn” by refining errors until they disappear. It is similar to the way a student learns, where an initial solution is reviewed and errors are identified and sent back to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer 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 protege Nick Frosst, who was Hinton’s first hire at Google’s AI division in Toronto.
His “playfulness and genuine interest in answering fundamental questions are, I believe, the key to his success as a scientist,” Frosst said.
He also did not stop at his groundbreaking work from the 1980s.
“He’s been trying crazy things all the time and some of them work really well and some of them don’t,” Frosst said. “But they all contributed to the success of the field and pushed other researchers to try new things too.”
Hinton’s team at the University of Toronto stunned colleagues by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That spawned a stream of copycats and was “a very, very important moment in retrospect and in the course of AI history. ‘, said computer scientist from Stanford University and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.
“Many people consider this the birth of modern AI,” she 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 did was nonsense,” Hinton told the AP in 2019. “My message to young researchers is: don’t be put off if everyone tells you that what you are doing is stupid. .”
Many of Hinton’s former students and employees followed him into the technology industry as it began to capitalize AI innovationsand some started their own AI companies, including Frosst’s Cohere and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Hinton said he uses machine learning tools in his daily life.
“Every time I want to know the answer to something, I’m just going to ask GPT-4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t trust it completely because it can hallucinate, but it’s not a very good expert for almost everything. And that is very useful.”
The physics prize for groundbreaking AI work is significant
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 how groundbreaking science comes from crossing the boundaries of scientific fields like physics, biology and chemistry rather than researchers staying on their own path. Therefore, 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 the physics, you just can’t tackle the class of problems,” Hopfield said.
Although there is no Nobel Prize for computer science, Li said awarding a traditional science prize to AI pioneers is important and shows how the boundaries between disciplines have blurred.
Disagreement over AI risks
Not all their colleagues agree with the Nobel laureates about the risks of the technology they helped create.
Frosst has had many “spirited 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 usually disagree on the time scale and on the specific technology he’s raising the alarm for,” Frosst said. “I don’t think neural nets and language models as they exist today pose an existential risk.”
Bengio, who has long worried about the risks of AI, said what really worries him and Hinton is the “loss of human control” and whether AI systems will act morally if they are smarter than humans.
“We don’t know the answers to these questions,” he said. “And we need to make sure we do that before we build those machines.”
Asked whether the Nobel Committee would have taken Hinton’s warnings into account when deciding on the prize, Bengio denied that, saying: “We are talking about very early work, when we thought everything would be rosy.”
Six days of Nobel Prize announcements began Monday when Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the medicine prize. They continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize on October 14.
The price carries a monetary award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest from the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Borenstein reported from Washington. AP reporters Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York and Kelvin Chan in London contributed.
