On 8 October 2024, Geoffrey Hinton (KC 1967) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, alongside John Hopfield, for their foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Machine learning based on artificial neural networks is currently revolutionising science, engineering and daily life. It has long been important for research, including the sorting and analysis of vast amounts of data. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning.
When we talk about artificial intelligence, we often mean machine learning using artificial neural networks. This technology was originally inspired by the structure of the brain. In an artificial neural network, the brain’s neurons are represented by nodes that have different values. These nodes influence each other through connections that can be likened to synapses and which can be made stronger or weaker. The network is trained, for example by developing stronger connections between nodes with simultaneously high values. This year’s laureates have conducted important work with artificial neural networks from the 1980s onward.
Geoffrey Hinton used a network invented by John Hopfield as the foundation for a new network: the Boltzmann machine. This can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data. Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science of systems built from many similar components. The machine is trained by feeding it examples that are very likely to arise when the machine is run. The Boltzmann machine can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of pattern on which it was trained. Hinton has built upon this work, helping initiate the current explosive development of machine learning.
Following a long career in academia and a decade at Google, in which he became known as "the Godfather of AI" and won the Turing Prize, he resigned from Google in 2023 and has been speaking publicly on the risks he sees AI posing. He visited King's in May 2023, seeing material newly acquired by the Turing Archive and his old room on X Staircase in Bodley's Coujrt before giving a talk to a packed audience with the University's Centre for Existential Risk.
