Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian researcher known as the Godfather of AI whose findings helped spur technological revolution, has won the Nobel Prize in physics.
Hinton, who has spent most of his career at University of Toronto, was awarded the prize along with Princeton University researcher John Hopfield for their work laying the foundations that allow for machine learning using artificial neural networks.
“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” Hinton said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone Tuesday.
Ellen Moons, a member of the committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”
She said such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”
While the committee honoured the science behind artificial intelligence, Moons also mentioned its flip side.
“While machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future,” she said.
“Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”
Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
Hinton, now 76, said he continues to worry “about a number of possible bad consequences” of his machine learning work, “particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
Still, he said, he would do it all over again.
The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor, or about C$1.45 million, from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
In the 1980s, Hinton helped develop a technique known as backpropagation, which has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”
In 2012, his team at the University of Toronto won the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition by designing a technique that could identify images far better than any of their competitors.
One of the team’s two graduate students, Ilya Sutskever, is the co-founder of OpenAI and considered one of the architects of the company’s hugely popular chatbot, ChatGPT.
Hinton said he uses the chatbot himself.
“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement, referring to the chatbot’s latest model.
“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.”
Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award, computer science’s top prize.
Born in London, U.K., Hinton joined the U of T computer science department as a professor in 1987. He left in 1998 to found a computational neuroscience unit at University College London, but returned in 2001 and is now a professor emeritus.
In a statement, U of T president Meric Gertler said he was delighted by the news of Hinton’s prize.
“The U of T community is immensely proud of his historic accomplishment,” he said.
