He Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield They jointly share the prestigious award for their work on artificial neural networks that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
More specifically, Hinton and Hopfield received the award for “Fundamental discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks..”
The news comes as AI has become one of the main driving forces behind what some have called the fourth industrial revolution. Leading innovators in the sector are being recognized for their work. Earlier this year, Google Deepmind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis was awarded a knighthood in the United Kingdom for “services to artificial intelligence.”
Hinton is among the world’s most renowned researchers in the field of AI and has laid the foundation for many of the advances we have seen in recent years. He has often been called the “godfather of deep learning.” After earning a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978, Hinton co-created the back propagation algorithm, a method that allows neural networks to learn from their mistakes, transforming the way AI models are trained.
Hinton joined Google in 2013 after the search giant acquired his company DNNresearch. He I left Google last year. citing concern about the role AI was playing in the spread of misinformation. Today Hinton is a teacher at the University of Toronto.
Hopfield, a professor at princetonHe was also an early pioneer in some of the foundational work in AI. He developed what became known as the Red Hopfielda type of neural network that transformed AI by demonstrating how neural networks could store and retrieve patterns. It basically mimics how human memory works and shows how some of the principles of biology and physics could be applied to computing systems.
Nobel Prize winners, also known as “laureates,” receive various awards in recognition of their work, including a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash prize of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1 million), which is Divide among the winners if there is more than one. And obviously, the winners gain global prestige.
“The work of the laureates has already been of great benefit,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement. “In physics, we use artificial neural networks in a wide range of areas, such as the development of new materials with specific properties.”