‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield win Physics Nobel

US scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that laid the foundation for machine learning, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.

Hinton has been widely credited as a godfather of artificial intelligence and made headlines when he quit his job at Google last year to be able to more easily speak about the dangers of the technology he had pioneered.

“We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us,” Hinton said over the phone to the Nobel press conference, speaking from a hotel in California.

“It’s going to be wonderful in many respects, in areas like healthcare,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences. Particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hopfield, 91, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, said.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the academy said in a statement.