AI innovators win Nobel Prize for physics

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John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton have won the physics Nobel Prize for formative work on artificial intelligence that has helped drive scientific advances but raised fears about the risks of abuse.

The award highlights the fundamental role the AI field of machine learning now plays in research, because of the amount of data it can process at speed. Hinton, who quit Google last year so he could speak more freely, said he was “flabbergasted” by Tuesday’s honour and spoke of the power and perils of AI.

“It’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton told the award ceremony in Stockholm by telephone, citing AI-driven advances in healthcare and industrial productivity. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences — particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hopfield and Hinton won the SKr11mn ($1.06mn) prize for “foundational discoveries and inventions” in machine learning dating back to the 1980s, the Nobel Assembly said. Their work helped develop so-called artificial neural networks that mimic the biological wiring of the human brain to process information.

Hinton, who is revered in technology circles as one of the “godfathers” of AI, said its impact would be historic in magnitude.

“It will have a huge influence . . . comparable with the industrial revolution,” he said. “But 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.”

Hopfield, a US physicist, devised an artificial neural network to save and recreate patterns.

Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist, used Hopfield’s research to build a new network known as the Boltzmann machine. This can be used to classify images or create new examples of pattern types it has learned.

Together they helped “initiate the current explosive development of machine learning”, the Nobel organisers said.

Machine learning has become part of our daily lives in areas including facial recognition, language translation and medical diagnosis, said Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel committee for physics.

But the technology’s scope and ever-increasing capabilities have stoked fears ranging from its use by authoritarian states to the possibility of machines one day evolving to act independently of human instructions.

Moons warned that AI needed to be used carefully.

“While machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future,” Moons said. “Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefits of humankind.”