Scientists Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto and John Hopfield of Princeton University won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
Hinton, born in Britain, has spent the last decade splitting his time between teaching computer science at the University of Toronto and working for Google’s deep-learning artificial intelligence team, before announcing his resignation from the Alphabet company in 2023.
“I’m flabbergasted,” Hinton told the panel gathered at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.”I had no idea this would happen. I’m very surprised.”
The Nobel prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.44 million Cdn), which is shared between the winners if there are several. The physics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’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.
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In a wide-ranging interview with guest host Robyn Bresnahan, Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist who left his post at Google this month to sound the alarm about AI’s threat to humanity, says he knows he’s scaring people with his predictions. He hopes he’s scaring politicians into doing something. For the rest of us, he offers some hope: Humanity has survived some big threats before, like nuclear weapons, but only by taking them seriously and getting to work.
The physics award comes a day after two American biologists won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of microRNA.
Nobel announcements will continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.