John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton win the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to AI

Their research into neural networks in the 1980s paved the way for a technology that promises to revolutionize society, but has also raised apocalyptic fears.

“Under the same circumstances, I would do the same thing again, but I’m concerned that the overall consequence of this could be that systems smarter than us eventually take over,” Hinton, 76, a professor at the University of California, told reporters. Toronto, in a telephone interview after the announcement.

Hinton, considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, attracted attention in 2023 when he resigned from his job at Google to warn about the “profound risks to society and humanity” of the technology.

The two were awarded “for their fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning using artificial neural networks,” the jury said in a statement.

Hopfield, a 91-year-old American professor at Princeton University, was noted for creating the “Hopfield network,” also known as associative memory, which can be used to “store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns.”

Artificial neural networks are inspired by the network of neurons in the human brain.

These networks have been used to advance research in fields as diverse as particle physics, materials science and astrophysics, and have become part of our daily lives, including facial recognition and translation, he noted. press Ellen Moons, committee chair Nobel of Physics.

With the work of the winners, humanity now has a series of tools “that we can choose to use for good purposes,” the committee highlighted.

The winner of Nobel receives a check for 11 million Swedish crowns, the equivalent of one million dollars or more than 970,000 euros.