Nobel Prize in physics awarded to AI pioneers

(China Daily) The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to artificial intelligence pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, which picked the winners that were announced on Tuesday, said they were selected because of their “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”.

The academy said the pair used tools from the world of physics to develop methods that established the foundation for powerful machine learning, which was crucial to the development of artificial intelligence.

Hopfield, they said, created an associative memory that was capable of storing and reconstructing images and patterns in data.

Hinton, the academy added, was honored for inventing a way to autonomously find properties in data.

Hinton, a British-Canadian professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, said after being unveiled as this year’s winner: “I’m flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen.”

He also sounded a note of caution about AI, telling the academy as he accepted his award that he worries “that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control”.

Hopfield is a professor at Princeton University in the United States

A year ago, the Nobel Prize in physics was won by Pierre Agostini, from France, Franco-Swede Anne L’Huillier, and Hungarian-Austrian Ferenc Krausz, for their research into electrons inside atoms and molecules.

Tuesday’s announcement of the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize for physics followed Monday’s unveiling of the winners of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Further announcements on Wednesday and Thursday will reveal the winners of the Nobel prizes in chemistry and literature, with the Nobel Peace Prize set to be announced Friday, and the Nobel Prize in economics slated for publication on Monday.

The Nobel prizes were established by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who left a fortune when he died in 1896 that he said must be used as prize money, to reward excellence in various fields.

This year’s Nobel Prize winners, who are known as laureates, will be presented with medals and a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) at a ceremony on Dec 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

The prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, are only open to living experts and are aimed at what Nobel described as those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on humankind”.