John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton gained the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his or her groundbreaking work on machine studying and synthetic neural networks, the Nobel committee introduced Tuesday.
The award comes with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million), which is shared between the winners if there are a number of. The physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Hinton, who is called the Godfather of synthetic intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works on the University of Toronto and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” stated Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. “They were the persons who did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
The synthetic neural networks they pioneered are used all through science and medication and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation,” stated Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee on the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
Hinton predicted that AI will find yourself having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing enhancements in productiveness and well being care.
“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he stated in an open name with reporters and the officers from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton stated. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
The Nobel committee that honored the science behind machine studying and AI additionally talked about fears about its doable flipside. Moons stated that whereas it has “enormous benefits, 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 for the greatest benefit of humankind.”
Hinton shares these issues. He stop a task at Google so he may extra freely converse in regards to the risks of the know-how he helped create.
“I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton stated on the Nobel announcement.
On Tuesday, he stated he was shocked on the honor.
“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he stated when reached by the Nobel committee on the cellphone. He stated he was at an affordable resort with no web.
There was no instant response from Hopfield.
Hinton, now 76, within the Nineteen Eighties helped develop a method generally known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in coaching machines the way to “learn” by fine-tuning errors till they disappear.
It’s just like the way in which a pupil learns from a trainer with an preliminary answer graded and flaws recognized and returned to be mounted and repaired. This course of continues till the reply matches the community’s model of actuality.
His workforce on the University of Toronto later wowed friends by utilizing a neural community to win the distinguished ImageNet pc imaginative and prescient competitors in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving beginning to the rise of recent AI.
Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun gained pc science’s prime prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.
“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton advised The Associated Press in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on. My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly.”
And Hinton himself makes use of machine studying in his each day life.
“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT4,” Hinton stated on the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything, it’s a not very good expert. And that’s very useful.”
“Twenty years ago, I think people would have happily agreed that systems with the ability of GPT-4 or (Google’s) Gemini had achieved general intelligence comparable to that of humans,” Hinton advised the AP this spring. “Being able to answer more or less any question in a sensible way would have passed the test. But now that AI can do that, people want to change the test.”
Hopfield, 91, created an associative reminiscence that may retailer and reconstruct photographs and different kinds of patterns in knowledge, the Nobel Committee stated.
“What fascinates me most is still this question of how mind comes from a machine,” Hopfield stated in a video posted on-line by The Franklin Institute after it awarded him a physics prize in 2019.
Hinton used Hopfield’s community as the muse for a brand new community that makes use of a special technique, generally known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee stated can study to acknowledge attribute components in a given sort of information.
Six days of Nobel bulletins opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun profitable the drugs prize for his or her discovery of tiny bits of genetic materials that function on-and-off switches inside cells that assist management what the cells do and after they do it. If scientists can higher perceive how they work and the way to manipulate them, it may at some point result in highly effective remedies for ailments like most cancers.
The physics prize carries a money award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to obtain their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s dying.
Nobel bulletins proceed with the Chemistry Physics Prize on Wednesday and Literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize might be introduced on Friday and the Economics Award on Oct. 14.
Source: www.dailysabah.com