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John J Hopfield and Geoffrey E Hinton are awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. Professor Anders Irback explains their work at the press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden October 8, 2024
What two Nobel Prizes mean for AI
Artificial intelligence researchers won big at the Nobel Prizes this year, taking home not one but two of the esteemed international awards.
First, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in physics for developing artificial neural networks, the machine-learning technique that has powered the current AI boom by replicating how the human brain processes information. Then, the Nobel committee awarded the chemistry prize to University of Washington biochemist David Baker as well as Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. (Hassabis is DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO.) The trio was honored for developing techniques to use artificial intelligence to model and design proteins.
The Nobel wins come with cash prizes (11 million Swedish crowns, or $1.06 million), but also international recognition that could fuel further research and funding in artificial intelligence. Academic papers on innovative subjects tend to increase after the Nobel committee honors a discovery, Wired noted, as seen with the award for the isolation of the carbon structure graphene in 2010.
Of course, AI is already the subject of a global industrial boom, but the Nobel prizes are celebrations of what AI can do at its best — not a warning of how it can go wrong. Hinton, for his part, issued a warning after winning the physics prize. AI, he told CNN in an interview, “will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us.”
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.