Nobel physics prize 2024 won by AI pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton

STOCKHOLM (Reuters): US scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for discoveries and inventions in machine learning that paved the way for the artificial intelligence boom.

Heralded for its revolutionary potential in areas ranging from cutting-edge scientific discovery to more efficient admin, the emerging technology on which the duo worked has also raised fears humankind may soon be outsmarted and outcompeted by its own creation.

Hinton has been widely credited as a godfather of AI and made headlines when he quit his job at Google last year to be able to more easily speak about the dangers of the technology he had pioneered.

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“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Hinton said over the phone to the Nobel press conference, speaking from a hotel in California.

“It’s going to be wonderful in many respects, in areas like healthcare,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences. Particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hopfield, 91, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the academy said in a statement.