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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.One of three Nobel Peace Prize winners for 2022, Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski.
Applause and debate over Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to human rights activists in a region at war. While many celebrated the work of all three in the face of authoritarianism, the shared nature of the award also stirred debate. A Russian civil rights organization, an agency investigating war crimes in Ukraine, and a Belarusian activist won the coveted award.
Jailed Belarusian Ales Bialiatski, Russian pro-rights advocate group Memorial, and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine have all undertaken difficult work at great risk to challenge authoritarianism in their countries.
“[The laureates] have for many years promoted the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee.
Memorial, officially outlawed by Moscow last year, was dedicated to uncovering Soviet-era repression. On Friday, as it received its Nobel, the group lost a court battle against the Putin government when a judge ordered the state seizure of its Moscow headquarters.
Bialiatski, meanwhile, founded the human rights center Viasna in Belarus and has fought for civil liberties for decades. Detained without trial since last summer, Bialiatski reportedly faces up to 12 years in jail if convicted.
Finally, the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv dates back to 2007, when it was set up to promote human and democratic rights in Ukraine. Since February, it has documented alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
While many hailed the work of all three and the Nobel committee’s choice, some were frustrated by the decision to bunch the Ukrainian group together with the winners from Russia and Belarus, the two countries that coordinated to attack Ukraine seven and a half months ago.