On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to scientists John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for their groundbreaking work in the development of artificial neural networks, which are now fundamental to the functioning of technologies such as Google search engines and AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The award recognizes Dr. Hopfield’s invention of the Hopfield network in the early 1980s and Dr. Hinton’s contributions to the creation of the Boltzmann machine in the years that followed. The announcement surprised many in the physics and artificial intelligence communities, including both laureates.
In 2019, Dr. Hinton, alongside two colleagues, received the Turing Award, often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their contributions to neural networks. He garnered global attention last year after resigning from his position at Google, cautioning that the AI technologies he was instrumental in developing could pose a existential threat to humanity.
Despite his significant contributions, Dr. Hinton does not have a formal background in physics. He has often humorously recounted being introduced at a conference as someone who had “failed at physics, dropped out of psychology, and then joined a field with no standards at all: artificial intelligence.” While he enjoyed sharing this anecdote, he always emphasized an important point about the importance and rigor of the AI field.