Geoffrey Hinton, one of the two physicists who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is often referred to as the “Godfather of AI”, a title which he has earned through his astonishing work in the field.
John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton were on Tuesday announced as the winners of 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries and inventions which enable machine learning within artificial neural networks. Machine learning enables computers using neural networks to imitate the ability learn and memorize details in a manner humans do, and this has been made possible by the work done by this year’s Nobel laureates.
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the two physicists who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is often referred to as the “Godfather of AI”, a title which he has earned through his astonishing work in the field.
But interestingly, Hinton, who once worked for Google, quit the tech giant to warn the world about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here’s what we know about the Nobel-prize winning scientist.
Who is Geoffrey Hinton?
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, known for his groundbreaking work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title “Godfather of AI”. A brilliant student since his early years, Hinton joined the Clifton College in Bristol and then the famed King’s College in Cambridge.
In an interview, Hinton revealed he was unsure which course he wanted to take and kept changing subjects between natural science, history of art and philosophy, finally earning a Bachelors degree in experimental psychology in 1970. Eight years later, Hinton received a doctorate (PhD) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1978 from the University of Edinburgh, and started tenure at the University of Sussex.
However, Geoffrey Hinton found fund hard to come by and moved to the United States where he worked at the the University of California, San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. Hinton was also the founding director of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.
Quit Google to warn people about AI threat
Geoffrey Hinton worked with Google for a decade, from 2013 to 2023 while also teaching at the University of Toronto, but in May 2023, the genius scientist publicly resigned from the tech giant, while expressing concerns over the dangers posed by AI technology.
After leaving Google, Hinton co-founded the Vector Institute in Toronto and became its chief scientific advisor. Currently, the Nobel laureate is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
Warnings, predictions about AI
Geoffrey Hinton has been very vocal about the dangers presented by an unhinged AI, often publicly warning about the threat it presents. Asked about the impact the technology being built using his research being, Hinton said the next leap in humanity’s technological evolution will be equal to the industrial revolution.
“It will be the equivalent of the industrial revolution. But instead of overtaking people in physical strength, it’s going to overtake people in intellectual capacity. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Hinton said in a telephonic interview after the Nobel Prize announcement.
However, besides the doom and gloom, Hinton has also predicted that his research will lead to technology which will revolutionize healthcare and medicine, leading to “huge improvements in productivity.”
“But we also have to worry about a lot of potential bad consequences, especially about the danger of these things getting out of control.” He also warned that AI “knows how to program, so it will find ways to avoid the restrictions we put in place. It will find ways to motivate people to work according to its own will,” the scientist warned.
Geoffrey Hinton – Awards and laurels
Apart from the winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, Hinton has also won the prestigious Turing Award, called the Nobel Prize of Computing”, in 2018 along with fellow scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their work in the field of deep learning. On Tuesday, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were announced as the recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
According to the announcement, Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other patterns in data, while Hinton invented a method which automatically finds properties in data, allowing AI-based systems to identify specific elements in pictures.