Geoffrey E. Hinton, widely known as the “Godfather of AI”, has been awarded the 2024 Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his “fundamental discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks”. Has been awarded the Nobel Prize. He shared this award with John Hopfield. The Nobel Prize release states, “John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton used the tools of physics to create methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning. Machine learning based on artificial neural networks Currently revolutionizing science, engineering and daily life.”

“John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. “Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in images,” the release said.

As Hinton won the award today, the new physics laureate joked at the press conference: “I’m in a cheap hotel in California with no good internet or phone connection. I was going to have an MRI scan today but I had to Must be cancelled!”

Hinton is a prominent figure in the tech world who has often spoken out about the dangers of AI. Between 2013 and 2023, Hinton worked at Google (Google Brain) while also teaching at the University of Toronto. At university, Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI and its former chief scientist, was a student of machine learning and worked closely with Geoffrey Hinton. Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, is also one of Hinton’s students.

In 2023, Geoffrey Hinton left Google, citing concerns about the increase in misinformation, the potential disruption of the job market by AI, and the “existential threat” posed by the development of true digital intelligence.

Geoffrey Hinton worked at Google for more than a decade and made significant contributions to the development of artificial intelligence. With two of his students, he created a neural network that laid the foundation for widely used AI models such as ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard. However, Hinton became concerned about the potential dangers of AI. Realizing the risks associated with the technology he helped pioneer, he decided to step down from his position at Google in 2023 to raise awareness of the potential threats posed by AI.

In October last year, in an interview, Geoffrey Hinton discussed the unsettling potential of AI gaining the ability to manipulate humans. He highlighted the unprecedented development of systems that can surpass human intelligence and emphasized the dangers of these AI entities influencing people. According to Hinton, such advanced AI would have access to vast knowledge, including literature and political strategies, which would make them highly effective at persuasion. He warned that AI equipped with this comprehensive understanding could become adept at manipulating human behavior and decision making on a large scale.