Pioneers in artificial intelligence win the Nobel Prize in physics

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.

Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce.

The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives," said Ellen Moons of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton's, told The Associated Press, “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had."

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.

“But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

The Nobel committee also mentioned fears about the possible flipside.

Moons said that while it has "enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Hinton, who quit a role at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create, shares those concerns.

“I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton said.

For his part, Hopfield, who signed early petitions by researchers calling for strong control of the technology, compared the risks and benefits to work on viruses and nuclear energy, capable of helping and harming society. At a Princeton news conference, he made reference to the concerns, bringing up the dystopia imagined in George Orwell's “1984,” or the fictional apocalypse inadvertently created by a Nobel-winning physicist in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.”

Hopfield, who was staying with his wife at a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after grabbing coffee and getting his flu shot, he opened his computer to a flurry of activity.

“I’ve never seen that many emails in my life,” he said. A bottle of champagne and bowl of soup were waiting, he added, but he doubted there were any fellow physicists in town to join the celebration.

Hinton said he was shocked at the honor.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone. He said he was at a cheap hotel with no internet.

Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation instrumental in training machines how to “learn" by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns, with an initial solution graded and flaws identified and returned to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.

Hinton had an unconventional background as a psychologist who also dabbled in carpentry and was genuinely curious about how the mind works, said protege Nick Frosst, who was Hinton’s first hire at Google’s AI division in Toronto.

His “playfulness and genuine interest in answering fundamental questions I think is key to his success as a scientist,” Frosst said.

Nor did he stop at his pioneering 1980s work.

“He’s been consistently trying out crazy things and some of them work very well and some of them don’t,” Frosst said. “But they all have contributed to the success of the field and galvanized other researchers to try new things as well.”

Hinton's team at the University of Toronto wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That spawned a flurry of copycats and was “a very, very significant moment in hindsight and in the course of AI history,” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.

“Many people consider that the birth of modern AI,” she said.

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told told the AP in 2019. "My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what you are doing is silly.”

Many of Hinton's former students and collaborators followed him into the tech industry as it began capitalizing on AI innovations, and some started their own AI companies, including Frosst's Cohere and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Hinton said he uses machine learning tools in his daily life.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it's a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful.”

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

Just as Hinton came to the field from psychology, Hopfield stressed how cutting edge science comes from crossing the borders of scientific fields like physics, biology and chemistry instead of researchers staying in their lane. It's why this prize is a physics prize, he said, pointing out that his neural network borrows from condensed matter physics.

With big complex problems in scientific fields, “if you are not motivated by physics, you just don't tackle the class of problems,” Hopfield said.

While there's no Nobel for computer science, Li said that awarding a traditional science prize to AI pioneers is significant and shows how boundaries between disciplines have blurred.

Not all of Hinton's peers agree with him about the risks of the technology he helped create.

Frosst has had many “spirited debates” with Hinton about AI’s risks and disagrees with some of Hinton’s warnings but not his willingness to publicly address them.

“Mostly we disagree on timescale and on the particular technology that he’s sounding the alarm on,” Frosst said. “I don’t think that neural nets and language models as they exist today pose an existential risk.”

Bengio, who has long sounded alarms about AI risks, said what really alarms him and Hinton is “loss of human control” and whether AI systems will act morally when they're smarter than humans.

“We don’t know the answer to these questions,” he said. "And we should make sure we do before we build those machines.”

Asked whether the Nobel committee might have factored in Hinton’s warnings when deciding on the award, Bengio dismissed that, saying “we’re talking about very early work when we thought that everything would be rosy.”

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. They continue with the chemistry prize Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Borenstein reported from Washington. AP reporters Mike Corder at The Hague, Netherlands; Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York and Kelvin Chan in London contributed.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, seen in picture, are awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced at a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

Professor Anders Irbäck explains the work of John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton after being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics at a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

This photo combo shows the 2024 Nobel Prize winners in Physics, professor John Hopfield, left, of Princeton University, and professor Geoffrey Hinton, of the University of Toronto, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (Princeton University via AP and Noah Berger/AP Photo)

FILE - Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton poses backstage at the Collision Conference in Toronto, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who studies neural networks used in artificial intelligence applications, poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

FILE - Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who studies neural networks used in artificial intelligence applications, poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

File - Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

FILE - Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton speaks at the Collision Conference in Toronto, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, seen in picture, are awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, which is announced at a press conference by Hans Ellergren, center, permanent secretary at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

FILE - A Nobel Prize medal is displayed before a ceremony at the Swedish Ambassador's Residence in London, Monday, Dec. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

The Nobel Prize in physics is being awarded, a day after 2 Americans won the medicine prize

The Nobel Prize in physics is being awarded, a day after 2 Americans won the medicine prize

FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Former soccer player Mikheil Kavelashvili became president of Georgia on Saturday, as the ruling party tightened its grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia.

Kavelashvili, 53, easily won the vote given the Georgian Dream party’s control of a 300-seat electoral college that replaced direct presidential elections in 2017.

Georgian Dream retained control of parliament in the South Caucasus nation in an Oct. 26 election that the opposition alleges was rigged with Moscow’s help. Georgia’s outgoing president and main pro-Western parties have since boycotted parliamentary sessions and demanded a rerun of the ballot.

Georgian Dream has vowed to continue pushing toward EU accession but also wants to “reset” ties with Russia.

In 2008 Russia fought a brief war with Georgia, which led to Moscow’s recognition of two breakaway regions as independent, and an increase in the Russian military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Critics have accused Georgian Dream — established by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a shadowy billionaire who made his fortune in Russia — of becoming increasingly authoritarian and tilted toward Moscow, accusations the ruling party has denied. The party recently pushed through laws similar to those used by the Kremlin to crack down on freedom of speech and LGBTQ+ rights.

Pro-Western Salome Zourabichvili has been president since 2018 and has vowed to stay on after her six-year term ends Monday, describing herself as the only legitimate leader until a new election is held.

Georgian Dream's decision last month to suspend talks on their country's bid to join the European Union added to the opposition's outrage and galvanized protests.

Zourabichvili, 72, was born in France to parents with Georgian roots and had a successful career with the French Foreign Ministry before President Mikheil Saakashvili named her Georgia's top diplomat in 2004.

Constitutional changes made the president’s job largely ceremonial before Zourabichvili was elected by popular vote with Georgian Dream's support in 2018. She became sharply critical of the ruling party, accusing it of pro-Russia policies, and Georgian Dream unsuccessfully tried to impeach her.

“I remain your president — there is no legitimate Parliament and thus no legitimate election or inauguration,” she has declared on the social network X. “My mandate continues.”

Speaking to The Associated Press, Zourabichvili rejected government claims that the opposition was fomenting violence.

“We are not demanding a revolution," Zourabichvili said. “We are asking for new elections, but in conditions that will ensure that the will of the people will not be misrepresented or stolen again.”

“Georgia has been always resisting Russian influence and will not accept having its vote stolen and its destiny stolen,” she said.

Georgian Dream nominated Kavelashvili — mocked by the opposition for lacking higher education. He was a striker in the Premier League for Manchester City and in several clubs in the Swiss Super League. He was elected to parliament in 2016 on the Georgian Dream ticket, and in 2022 co-founded the People’s Power political movement, which was allied with Georgian Dream and become known for its strong anti-Western rhetoric.

Kavelashvili was one of the authors of a controversial law requiring organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “pursuing the interest of a foreign power,” similar to a Russian law used to discredit organizations critical of the government.

The EU, which granted Georgia candidate status in December 2023 on condition that the country meets the bloc’s recommendations, put its accession on hold and cut financial support in June following approval of the “foreign influence” law.

Thousands of demonstrators converged on the parliament building every night after the government announced the suspension of EU accession talks on Nov. 28.

Riot police used water cannons and tear gas almost daily to disperse and beat scores of protesters, some of whom threw fireworks at police officers and built barricades on the capital’s central boulevard.

Hundreds were detained and over 100 treated for injuries.

Several journalists were beaten by police and media workers accused authorities of using thugs to deter people from attending anti-government rallies, which Georgian Dream denies.

The crackdown has drawn strong condemnation from the United States and EU officials.

FILE - FIFA World Stars team's Mikheil Kavelashvili, right, makes a shot on the goal during the Reunification Cup against Chinese national team in Hong Kong, on July 1, 2007. (AP Photo/Brian Ching, File)

FILE - A protester shouts during a rally demanding new parliamentary elections in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Nov. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Shakh Aivazov, File)

FILE - In this photo provided by the Georgian Dream party, Bidzina Ivanishvili, leader of the Georgian Dream party, which he initiated, applauds Mikheil Kavelashvili during a session discussing presidential candidates in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Nov. 27, 2024. (Georgian Dream party via AP, File)

FILE - Demonstrators rally outside the parliament's building to protest the government's decision to suspend negotiations on joining the European Union in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Nov. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Zurab Tsertsvadze, File)

FILE - Police shoot tear gas towards demonstrators during a protest against the government's decision to suspend negotiations on joining the European Union in Tbilisi, Georgia, early Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov, File)

FILE - Police try to detain a protester during a rally against the results of the parliamentary elections amid allegations that the vote was rigged in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Nov. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Zurab Tsertsvadze, File)

FILE - Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, center, is greeted by well-wishers as she attends an opposition protest against the results of the parliamentary election in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Zurab Tsertsvadze, File)

FILE - Mikheil Kavelashvili, who was nominated by the governing Georgian Dream party as a candidate for president, attends a news conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Feb. 14, 2019. (AP Photo, File)