'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton among Nobel Prize winners

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(Bloomberg) –One of the most influential academics in artificial intelligence, Geoffrey E. Hinton, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for training artificial neural networks and laying the foundations for today’s machine learning applications.

Hinton will share the 11 million-krona ($1.1 million) award with fellow scientist John J. Hopfield, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said in a statement Tuesday.

Their work began in the 1980s, setting the stage for the current boom in artificial intelligence that was enabled by an explosion of computing power and massive troves of training data. However, Hinton has in recent years warned about AI becoming too powerful.

Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Hinton is known in AI circles as one of the “godfathers” of the technology due in large part to his early research into neural networks — a kind of machine-learning software that loosely mimics the way the human brain works. 

In 1983, he co-invented Boltzmann machines, one of the first types of neural networks to use statistical probabilities, and later co-authored a seminal paper demonstrating that a technique for updating the strength of the connections within a neural network could imbue this software with remarkable learning capabilities.

“I’m flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen. I am very surprised,” Hinton, 76, told journalists gathered in Stockholm by phone. 

Hinton has warned about the risks of AI, while touting its benefits. He left his post at Google’s AI research team last year so that he could talk freely about the risks associated with developing AI too quickly.

He also supported a bill recently vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom, that would have held AI developers accountable for any severe harm caused by their technologies.

Asked on Tuesday about any regrets regarding his work, Hinton said: “In the same circumstances, I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.”

Neural networks that mimic the brain’s ability to process data will be “wonderful in many respects in areas like health care,” he said, but cautioned that there were “a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hinton, who was born in London, is affiliated with University of Toronto, Canada, while Chicago-born Hopfield, 91, is associated with Princeton University.

Among the most famous physics laureates include Albert Einstein in 1921 for services to theoretical physics and Marie Curie, together with her husband Pierre, for research on radiation in 1903. 

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. A prize in economic sciences was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.

The laureates are announced through Oct. 14 in Stockholm, with the exception of the peace prize, whose recipients are selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.