The godfather of artificial intelligence wins the Nobel Prize in Physics

AI is a huge reality, and it is also the recipient of the world’s most important honors, as on Tuesday, October 8, the Nobel Academy in Sweden awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for their discoveries and fundamental inventions that enable machine learning using artificial neural networks.

More precisely Hinton is called the “godfather of artificial intelligence”as he invented a method that could independently discover properties of data and which became important for the large neural networks used today.

Hopfield created a structure capable of storing and reconstructing information. A professor at Princeton, he was also one of the pioneers of fundamental work in the field of artificial intelligence. He developed what became known as the Hopfield network, a type of neural network that revolutionized AI by demonstrating how neural networks could store and retrieve patterns. Essentially, it simulates how human memory works and shows how some principles of biology and physics can be applied to computing systems.

2024 Physics Laureate Geoffrey Hinton received a call from Stockholm around 2 a.m. in a hotel room in California. In an interview recorded shortly after receiving the award, Hinton discusses the state of machine learning, the urgent need for security research, and he hopes the award will make people take the concerns he raised more seriously.

Hinton is one of the world’s most renowned artificial intelligence researchers, laying the foundation for many of the advances we have seen in recent years. He is often called the “godfather of deep learning.” After receiving his PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978, Hinton co-authored backpropagation, a technique that allows neural networks to learn from their mistakes by changing the way AI models are trained.

Hinton joins Google in 2013 after the search giant acquired his company DNNresearch. He resigned from Google last year, citing concerns about the role of artificial intelligence in spreading misinformation. Hinton is currently a professor at the University of Toronto.