‘Godfather of A.I.’ Geoffrey Hinton Wins the Nobel Prize in Physics

Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto professor hailed as the “Godfather of A.I.” for his contributions to the technology, wasn’t expecting a call this morning (Oct. 8) declaring him a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. “I had no idea I’d even been nominated,” said Hinton in an interview after the announcement, adding that his first thought was “how could I be sure it wasn’t a spoof call.”

Hinton co-won the annual prize with John Hopfield of Princeton University for their decades of work in training artificial neural networks, which are inspired by the structure of the human brain and helped usher in the current A.I. revolution. The two researchers will share 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million) in prize money. “In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties,” said Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, in a statement.

Hopfield, who has also worked at institutions like Bell Laboratories, the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, was honored for his invention of the Hopfield network, a neural network model that helps machines store information. He, too, was surprised to receive the news that he is now a Nobel Prize laureate. After going out for a coffee and flu shot this morning, the American scientist returned home to a pile of emails that were “astounding” and “heartwarming,” according to a press release from Princeton University.

Building upon the Hopfield network, Hinton helped develop the Boltzmann machine to classify images and create new examples of patterns. He previously received the Turing Award, a prize often dubbed the “Nobel prize of computer science,” alongside A.I. researchers Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun in 2019 for their work on neural networks.

Originally from England, Hinton moved to the U.S. in the 1970s and eventually Canada in the 1980s. He took a role at Google (GOOGL) in 2013 after a startup he created with two University of Toronto students was acquired by the company for $44 million. When asked whether he considers himself a computer scientist of a physicist, Hinton said he is “someone who doesn’t really know what field he’s in but would like to understand how the brain works.”

Hinton left his position at Google last year, in part to speak more freely about his growing concerns surrounding the power of A.I. Despite lauding its potential to create solutions in fields like health care, Hinton has also advocated for greater regulation to ensure companies like OpenAI set aside resources for safety research. “There’s regret where you feel guilty because you did something you knew you shouldn’t have done, and there’s regret where you did something you would do again in the same circumstances but it may in the end not turn out well,” Hinton told reporters during the Nobel Prize announcement ceremony, noting that he identifies with the second case but is worried that the overall consequence of A.I. “might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.”

With a Nobel Prize under his belt, Hinton said he expects the award to give more credence to his warnings. “Hopefully it will make me more credible when I say these things.”