American John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their pioneering work on machine learning, a tool used in the development of artificial intelligence.
Their research into neural networks in the 1980s paved the way for a technology that promises to revolutionize society, but has also raised apocalyptic fears.
“Under the same circumstances, I would do the same thing again, but I worry that the overall consequence of this could be that systems smarter than us eventually take over,” Hinton, 76, a professor at the University of California, told reporters. Toronto, in a telephone interview after the announcement.
Hinton, considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, attracted attention in 2023 when he resigned from his job at Google to warn about the “profound risks to society and humanity” of the technology.
The two were awarded “for their fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning using artificial neural networks,” the jury said in a statement.
Hopfield, a 91-year-old American professor at Princeton University, was noted for having created the “Hopfield network,” also known as associative memory, which can be used to “store and reconstruct images and other types of models.”
Artificial neural networks are inspired by the network of neurons in the human brain.
These networks have been used to advance research in fields as diverse as particle physics, materials science and astrophysics, and have become part of our daily lives, including facial recognition and translation, he noted. press Ellen Moons, president of the Nobel Physics committee.
With the work of the winners, humanity now has a series of tools “that we can choose to use for good purposes,” the committee highlighted.
Like “the industrial revolution”
Hinton started from the “Hopfield network” to create a new network using a different method: “the Boltzmann machine.”
Thus, “he invented a method capable of autonomously finding properties in the data and, therefore, performing tasks such as identifying specific elements in images,” the jury added.
“I am amazed. “I didn’t imagine this could happen,” he said in the telephone interview.
The award-winner acknowledged that he is an avid user of AI tools like ChatGPT, and insisted that he is concerned about the potential repercussions of the technology he helped spawn.
“This will be comparable to the industrial revolution. But instead of overwhelming people in physical strength, it will surpass them in terms of intellectual capabilities,” he commented.
“We have no experience of what it means to have things smarter than us, and that will be fantastic in many ways, in areas such as health,” he added.
The Nobel Prize in Physics is the second Nobel Prize of the season, after the Medicine Prize was awarded on Monday to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.
The American duo were awarded for their discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to French-Swedish Anne L’Huillier, Frenchman Pierre Agostini and Austro-Hungarian Ferenc Krausz for their research on tools to explore electrons within atoms and molecules.
The awards season continues this week with the announcement of the winner or winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday, followed by the long-awaited Literature Prize on Thursday and the Peace Prize on Friday. The Economics Prize will close the season on Monday, October 14.
Awarded since 1901, the Nobel Prizes honor those who, in the words of prize creator and scientist Alfred Nobel, “conferred the greatest benefit to humanity.”
The Nobel winner receives a check for 11 million Swedish crowns, the equivalent of one million dollars or more than 970,000 euros.