British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton and American John Hopfield yesterday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering work in the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
The pair were honored “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” the jury said.
“These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, material science and astrophysics,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told a news conference.
Photo: AFP
Moons said that these tools have also become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.
While lauding the potential of AI, Moons said that “its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future collectively.”
“Humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way,” she said.
Hopfield, a 91-year-old professor at Princeton University, was spotlighted for having created “an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.”
The jury said Hinton, a 76-year-old professor at the University of Toronto, “invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.”
“I’m flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen,” Hinton told reporters via telephone as the laureates were announced in Stockholm.
Hinton said he was an avid user of AI tools such as ChatGPT, but also conceded that he had concerns about the potential impact of the technology he helped spawn.
“In the same circumstances, I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” the researcher added.
The Nobel Prize in Physics is the second Nobel of the season after the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday was awarded to US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.
The duo were honoured for their discovery of microRNA and its role in how genes are regulated.
Awarded since 1901, the Nobel Prizes honor those who have, in the words of prize creator and scientist Alfred Nobel, “conferred the greatest benefit on humankind.”
The physics prize is to be followed by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today, with the highly watched literature and peace prizes to be announced on Thursday and Friday respectively.
The economics prize wraps up this year’s Nobel season on Monday next week.
The winners receive their prize, consisting of a diploma, a gold medal and US$1 million, from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.
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