Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, and physicist John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their pioneering work on the foundations of artificial intelligence.
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The pair’s 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’m worried that the overall consequence of this could be that systems smarter than us end up taking control,” Hinton, a 76-year-old British-Canadian, told reporters in a telephone interview after the announcement.
Hinton caused a stir in 2023 when he quit his job at Google to warn of the technology’s “profound risks to society and humanity.”
The couple was honored “for fundamental discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks”said the jury.
Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a news conference that these tools have become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.
While praising the potential of AI, Moons noted that “its rapid development has also raised concerns about our collective future.”
“Humans have a responsibility to use this new technology safely and ethically”he stated.
Hopfield, a 91-year-old American professor at Princeton University, was recognized for having created the “Hopfield network,” also known as associative memory, which can be used to “store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data.”
Arrival of AI is compared to the industrial revolution
The jury said Hinton, a 76-year-old professor at the University of Toronto, used Hopfield’s network as the basis for a new network: “the Boltzmann machine.”
Hinton is credited with inventing “a method that can autonomously find properties in data and thus perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in images.”
“I’m flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen,” Hinton told reporters in a telephone interview as the awardees were announced in Stockholm.
Hinton said he was an avid user of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and said he believed the technology will be “very influential.”
“It will be comparable to the industrial revolution, but instead of surpassing people in physical strength, it will surpass them in intellectual ability,” Hinton stated.
“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us, and it’s going to be wonderful in many ways, in areas like healthcare,” he said.
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Source: https://www.noticiascaracol.com/mundo/premio-nobel-de-fisica-a-hopfield-y-hinton-por-su-trabajo-sobre-inteligencia-artificial-cb20
