Professor Anders Irback speaks at a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences after announcing the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, in Stockholm, Sweden, on Tuesday to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton. Photo by Christine Olsson/EPA-EFE
Oct. 8 (UPI) — The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded on Tuesday to scientists a pair of scientists hailing from the United States and Canada for their work in artificial intelligence that has become the foundation of powerful machine learning.
The Nobel committee said John Hopfield, of Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data while Geoffrey Hinton, of the University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
“The laureates’ work has already been of the greatest benefit,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement. “In physics, we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties.”
The Nobel Committee said the idea of machine learning using artificial neural networks was inspired by how the human brain works. In the artificial neural network, the brain’s neurons are represented by nodes that have different values and influence each other through connections.
“This year’s laureates have conducted important work with artificial neural networks from the 1980s onward,” the committee said.
The committee said the world is just now coming to recognize how the work of Hopfield and Hinton in laying down some of the crucial foundations of artificial intelligence has shaped the global world and will continue to do so.
“With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of physical science, they have shown a completely new way for us to use computers to aid and to guide us to tackle many of the challenges our society faces,” the committee said.
Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI,” made headlines last year when he quit Google to focus on AI threat issues and joined hundreds of tech leaders to sign a statement warning about the risk of AI without the proper guardrails.
