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Bill Dally, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, QEPrize, The Mall, London.
AI pioneers share prestigious engineering prize
Seven AI pioneers on Tuesday took home the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a top award for groundbreaking innovations in science and engineering. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, Yann LeCun, Jensen Huang, Bill Dally, and Fei-Fei Li share this year’s prize for their contributions to the field of machine learning.
Bengio (Mila Quebec AI Institute), Hinton (Vector Institute), Hopfield (Princeton), and LeCun (NYU and Meta) won for their work on artificial neural networks, which help computers learn by mimicking the way the human brain works. These scholars have been awarded before. Hopfield and Hinton shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for this achievement; meanwhile, Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun shared the 2018 Turing Award.
Huang and Dally of Nvidia won for their graphics processing units, the computer chip architecture that enables machine learning models and applications. Li, a professor at Stanford, won for the database ImageNet that helped train computer vision models.
“This year’s winning innovation is a groundbreaking advancement that impacts everyone, yet the full extent of its underlying engineering remains largely unrecognized, making it an especially exciting choice,” said Dame Lynn Gladden, who chaired the judging panel for the award.Professor Ellen Moons, Secretary General at the Swedish Academy of Sciences Hans Ellegren, and Professor Anders Irback announce that John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton are the winners of this year's Nobel Prize winners in Physics in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 8, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Nobels awarded, OpenAI’s soaring valuation, Gemini is getting fluent, Grindr’s wingmen, Supermicro’s macro sales
2: Two AI researchers, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Oct. 8. The pair were credited as pioneers of artificial neural networks, the machine learning technique that has powered the artificial intelligence revolution. Neural networks help computers learn by mimicking the activities of the human brain. “Thanks to their work humanity now has a new item in its toolbox, which we can choose to use for good purposes,” the Nobel committee wrote on X.
157 billion: OpenAI raised $6.6 billion last week in a new funding round led by Thrive Capital, including other investors such as Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia. The company behind ChatGPT is now the second-most-valuable private company in the world, worth $157 billion, behind ByteDance ($220 billion) and just ahead of China’s Ant Group ($150 billion) and SpaceX ($125 billion).
9: Google is expanding its Gemini AI services in India. Since 40% of users there rely on voice interactions with the chatbot, the company says it will soon support not just Hindi, but nine total Indian languages — Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Urdu.
14 million: The gay dating app Grindr wants its 14 million users to have AI “wingmen.” These agents will help people find the most meaningful connections, plan dates, and — eventually — book reservations so you don’t have to lift a finger. Grindr says these features will be fully up and running by 2027 at the latest. Will your next date have to make any effort at all?
100,000: Supermicro, a company that makes servers for data centers, said it is shipping 100,000 graphics processors per quarter. The announcement sent its stock soaring more than 15% on Oct. 7, a day when the Dow Jones fell 400 points.