Geoffrey Hinton, one of the two physicists to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, has been called the “Godfather of AI”, a title he has earned through his groundbreaking work in the field.

John J. Hopfield and Jeffrey E. Hinton was announced Tuesday as the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his inventions and discoveries that enable machine learning in artificial neural networks. Machine learning allows computers to imitate the ability of humans to learn and remember using neural networks, and this is made possible by the work of this year's Nobel laureates.

Geoffrey Hinton, one of two physicists to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, has been called the “Godfather of AI”, a title he earned for his groundbreaking work in the field.

But interestingly, Hinton, who once worked for Google, left the tech giant to warn the world about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). Here's what we know about the Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

Who is Jeffrey Hinton?

Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, known for his seminal work on artificial neural networks, earning him the title “Godfather of AI”. A brilliant student from an early age, Hinton attended Clifton College, Bristol, and then the prestigious King's College, Cambridge.

In an interview, Hinton revealed that he wasn't sure what course he wanted to take and kept switching between natural sciences, art history, and philosophy, eventually earning a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology in 1970. Eight years later, Hinton received his doctorate (Ph.D.). ) in artificial intelligence (AI) from the University of Edinburgh in 1978, and began a tenure at the University of Sussex.

However, Geoffrey Hinton found funding difficult and moved to the United States where he worked at the University of California, San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. Hinton was also the founding director of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.

Leave it to Google to warn people about the AI ​​threat

Jeffrey Hinton worked with Google for a decade, teaching at the University of Toronto from 2013 to 2023, but in May 2023, the talented scientist publicly resigned from the tech giant, citing concerns over the dangers posed by AI technology.

After leaving Google, Hinton co-founded the Vector Institute in Toronto and became its chief scientific advisor. Currently, the Nobel laureate is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Warning, predictions about AI

Jeffrey Hinton has been very vocal about the dangers presented by an unfettered AI, often publicly warning of the danger it presents. When asked about the impact of the technology created using his research, Hinton said that humanity's next leap in technological evolution would be the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution.

“That would be the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution. But instead of surpassing people in physical strength, it will surpass people in intellectual ability. We don't experience what it's like to be smarter than us,” Hinton said in a telephone interview after the Nobel Prize was announced.

However, in addition to the doom and gloom, Hinton also predicts that his research will lead to technology that will revolutionize healthcare and medicine, leading to “great improvements in productivity.”

“But we also have to worry about a lot of potential bad consequences, especially the risk of these things getting out of control.” He also warned that AI “knows how to program, so it will find ways to circumvent the restrictions we put in place. It will find ways to get people to act on their own accord,” the scientist warned.

Jeffrey Hinton – Awards and Honors

In addition to winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, Hinton won the prestigious Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of Computing, in 2018 with fellow scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their work in the field of deep learning. On Tuesday, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were announced as recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

According to the announcement, Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other patterns in data, while Hinton invented a method that automatically detects properties in data, allowing AI-based systems to recognize specific elements in images.