Daily Times

US scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that laid the foundation for machine learning, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.

“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 award-giving body said in a statement. “Machine learning based on artificial neural networks is currently revolutionising science, engineering and daily life.” Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the academy said. Hinton, who works as a professor at University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and carry out tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures, it added.

“I am flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen,” Hinton said over the phone to the press conference announcing the prize. A pioneer of artificial intelligence, Hinton quit Google in 2023 and said he did so to speak freely about the technology’s dangers, after realising computers could become smarter than people far sooner than he and other experts had expected. “While machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said. “Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way, for the greatest benefit of humankind.”