Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and co-laureate John Hopfield have received the Nobel Prize for physics at a ceremony in Stockholm.
The accolade was bestowed on the pair of computer scientists Tuesday by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden after a presentation by Nobel physics committee chair Ellen Moons.
Moons told the audience gathered at the Stockholm Concert Hall that their work is considered to be fundamental to machine learning and called Hinton “a leading figure in the development of efficient learning algorithms.”
“He pioneered the efforts to establish deep and dense neural networks. Such networks are effective in sorting and interpreting large amounts of data and self-improve based on the accuracy of the result,” Moons said.
“Today, artificial neural networks are powerful tools in research fields spanning physics, chemistry and medicine, as well as in daily life.”
Hinton, a British Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield, a professor emeritus with Princeton University, were awarded the Nobel because their use of physics developed some of the underpinnings of machine learning, a branch of computer science that helps AI mimic how humans learn.
The work that earned Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of AI, the Nobel was completed in the 1980s, when AI was far from the buzzy technology it is today.
“It was a lot of fun doing the research but it was slightly annoying that many people — in fact, most people in the field of AI — said that neural networks would never work,” Hinton recalled during an October press conference on the day he was named as a Nobel laureate.
“They were very confident that these things were just a waste of time and we would never be able to learn complicated things like, for example, understanding natural language using neural networks — and they were wrong.”
Yet Hinton persevered and eventually created the Boltzmann machine, which learns from examples rather than instructions and when trained, can recognize familiar characteristics in information, even if it has not seen that data before.
Decades later it caught the eye of the Nobel committee, leading to the honour he received Tuesday.
The prize comes with 11 million Swedish kronor — about $1.4 million Canadian dollars — from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
Hinton and Hopfield will split the money, with some of Hinton’s share going to Water First, an Ontario organization working to boost Indigenous access to water, and another unnamed charity supporting neurodiverse young adults.
Hinton, now 77 after celebrating his birthday last week, has said he doesn’t plan to do much more “frontier research.”
He remains involved in the U of T community, which celebrated his Nobel win with three watch parties at campuses Tuesday, and is a chief scientific adviser for the Vector Institute, a Toronto-based AI research hub.
“I believe I’m going to spend my time advocating for people to work on safety,” he said in October.
Last year, Hinton left a role he held at Google to more freely speak about the dangers of AI, which he has said include bias and discrimination, fake news, joblessness, lethal autonomous weapons and even the end of humanity.
At a Stockholm press conference over the weekend, he said he doesn’t regret the work he did that laid the foundations of artificial intelligence, but wishes he thought of safety sooner.
“In the same circumstances, I would do the same again,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 10, 2024.
