Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton gets Physics Nobel Prize as AI research comes into spotlight

Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton gets the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his foundational discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks.

In Short

• Geoffrey Hinton wins 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for AI work
• Hinton shares award with John Hopfield for neural networks
• Hinton worked at Google, taught Ilya Sutskever and Yann LeCun

Geoffrey E Hinton, widely known as the "Godfather of AI," has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his "foundational discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks." He shares the award with John Hopfield. "John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning. Machine learning based on artificial neural networks is currently revolutionising science, engineering and daily life," the Nobel Prize release reads.

“John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures,” the release adds.

As Hinton won the award today, the new physics laureate jokingly said at the press conference: "I'm in a cheap hotel in California which doesn't have a good internet or phone connection. I was going to have an MRI scan today but I'll have to cancel that!"

Hinton is a prominent personality in the world of tech who has often spoken about the dangers of AI. Between 2013 and 2023, Hinton worked at Google (Google Brain), while also teaching at the University of Toronto. At the university, Ilya Sutskever, who is the co-founder of OpenAI and its former chief scientist, was a student of machine learning and worked closely with Geoffrey Hinton. Yann LeCun, who is the vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, is also one of Hinton’s students.

In 2023, Geoffrey Hinton left Google, raising alarm about the surge of misinformation, the potential disruption of the job market by AI, and the “existential threat” posed by the development of true digital intelligence.

Geoffrey Hinton worked at Google for over a decade, significantly contributing to the development of artificial intelligence. Along with two of his students, he created a neural network that laid the foundation for widely used AI models like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard. However, Hinton grew increasingly concerned about the potential dangers of AI. Realising the risks associated with the technology he helped pioneer, he decided to step down from his position at Google in 2023 to raise awareness about the potential threats posed by AI.

In October last year, in an interview, Geoffrey Hinton discussed the unsettling potential of AI gaining the ability to manipulate humans. He highlighted the unprecedented development of systems that could surpass human intelligence and emphasised the dangers of these AI entities influencing people. According to Hinton, such advanced AI would have access to vast knowledge, including literature and political strategies, making them highly effective at persuasion. He warned that AI, equipped with this extensive understanding, could become adept at manipulating human behaviour and decision-making on a large scale.