Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Nobel Prize in Physics

TIME

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence have won the Nobel Prize in physics. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the prize Tuesday for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning.

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00:00The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to

00:08John Hopfield, Princeton University, USA and Jeffrey Hinton, University of Toronto, Canada

00:17for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.

00:26Good morning, Professor Hinton.

00:29Good morning.

00:30Please accept our warmest congratulations to receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics.

00:37Thank you very much.

00:38How do you feel right now?

00:42I'm flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen. I'm very surprised.

00:50I could imagine.

00:51We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us.

00:56And it's going to be wonderful in many respects.

01:00In areas like healthcare, it's going to give us much better healthcare.

01:04In almost all industries, it's going to make them more efficient.

01:08People are going to be able to do the same amount of work with an AI assistant in much less time.

01:14It'll mean huge improvements in productivity.

01:18But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences,

01:23particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.

01:29I think it's fair to say that these two gentlemen were really the pioneers.

01:33They were the persons who did the fundamental work based on physical understanding,

01:38which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

01:45These two gentlemen were those who applied the laws of physics to a biologically inspired system,

01:50the neural network, and understood that it could be taught and it could be trained using data,

01:55and it could then be used to, for example, as we see today, answer questions, make images,

02:02medical diagnosis, all these sorts of things.

02:04So they have the original idea, and now it's grown into this big industry which we see today.

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