Tuesday morning, John Hopfield, professor at Princeton University, and Geoffrey Hinton, professor at the University of Toronto won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their fundamental discoveries and inventions that pioneered modern artificial intelligence.
Hopfield joined Caltech as a professor in 1980 and, two years later, published his seminal article in which he applied brain principles to computer circuits, creating a neural network capable of retaining memory and recognizing patterns.
Using Hopfield’s network, Hinton created a model that could not only distinguish between different patterns or images, but also generate new ones. His development later landed him a job at Google after the tech giant bought his company.
“These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research on physics topics as diverse as particle physics, materials science and astrophysics,” said Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, during of the announcement. “The winners’ discoveries and inventions are the building blocks of machine learning.”
The researchers will share a prize of approximately $1 million.
Hopfield was recruited to Caltech in 1978 after the university named a new president with a background in physics.
After years of attempts to model the human brain, Hopfield finally made his breakthrough in the early 1980s. called Caltech a “magnificent environment” to test his different ideas.
Around the same time, Hinton had left UC San Diego for Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where he developed his model based on Hopfield’s.
Called the Boltzmann machine, the model forms the basis of current generative AI models like ChatGPT (the “G” stands for “generative”).
Hinton and two of his students started a company based on this research in 2012, focused on using AI to identify common objects in photos, like flowers and dogs. Shortly after, Google bought it at auction for $44 million.
Hinton left her job at the tech giant in 2023 so he can publicly express his concerns about the technology he helped invent.
He fears that people will no longer be able to distinguish AI-generated images and videos from real images and opposes the use of AI on the battlefield. Hinton said part of him regrets his life’s work.
