Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the ‘Godfather of AI,’ has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. The University of Toronto’s Professor Emeritus shares the honour with Princeton University’s John J. Hopfield for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Dr. Hinton describes winning the Nobel Prize as a “total surprise.”
“I thought it must be a prank to begin with,” he says, adding that he didn’t know he had been nominated. “So, it took a while to sink in that this was real.”
Dr. Hinton has welcomed the platform afforded to him by the Nobel win to warn about the risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI) and the need for increased focus on safety. He left his job at Google in 2023 to focus on raising awareness among researchers, institutions, governments and the public about the risks of unfettered AI development.
“There is some evidence of the message getting through,” he says, but stresses that more action is needed.
“I’m pleased that it’s had an effect,” he says of his warnings. “Governments aren’t yet willing to do what needs to be done, but at least people are beginning to be aware of the problem — particularly the issue of whether these things are going to get smarter than us, and what might happen as a result.
“A few years ago, most people thought it was just science fiction, and now they understand that it’s a real problem that’s coming.”
Dr. Hinton says the research funding environment in Canada — particularly support for basic, curiosity-driven research — played an important role in his achievements in AI.
“That’s a big advantage Canada has in AI,” he says. “We now have these big institutes like the MILA (the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and the Vector Institute, which help a lot with funding AI.”
In 2024 Dr. Hinton also won the prestigious VinFuture Grand Prize for his leadership and foundational work in neural network architectures. He shared the prize with four other scientists, including Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, each receiving $3 million US for their transformational contributions to the advancement of deep learning.
Dr. Hinton won the Turing Award, often referred to as the ‘Nobel prize of computing,’ in 2018. In addition to his efforts to sound the alarm over AI safety needs, Dr. Hinton’s current interests include demonstrating that today’s chat bots have subjective experience.
