The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning.

British-Canadian Professor Hinton is sometimes called the “Godfather of AI” and said he was amazed.

He resigned from Google in 2023, warning of the dangers of machines that could outsmart people.

The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

American professor John Hopfield, 91, is a professor at Princeton University in the USA and Prof. Hinton, 76, is a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Machine learning is key to artificial intelligence because it develops how a computer can train itself to generate information.

It powers a variety of technologies we use today, from searching the Internet to editing photos on our cell phones.

“I had no idea this was going to happen. “I’m very surprised,” Prof. Hinton said on the phone with the academy a few minutes after the announcement.

He said he was at a hotel with poor internet in California and thought he might have to cancel the rest of his day’s schedule.

The academy listed some of the critical applications of the two scientists’ work, including improving climate modeling, developing solar cells and analyzing medical images.

Prof. Hinton’s groundbreaking research on neural networks paved the way for current AI systems such as ChatGPT.

In artificial intelligence, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they learn and process information. They enable AIs to learn from experience, just as a human would. This is called deep learning.

Prof Hinton said his work on artificial neural networks had been revolutionary.

“It will be like the Industrial Revolution – but instead of exceeding our physical capabilities, it will exceed our intellectual capabilities,” he said.

But he said he also worries about the future. He was asked if he regretted his life’s work, as he told a journalist last year.

In response, he said he would do the same work again, “but I worry that the overall consequence of this could be that systems smarter than us could eventually take control.”

He also said that he now uses the AI ​​chatbot ChatGPT4 for many things, but with the knowledge that it doesn’t always provide the right answer.

Professor John Hopfield invented a network that can store and recreate patterns.

It uses physics, which describes the properties of a material based on atomic spin.

Similar to how the brain tries to recall words by using related but incomplete words, Prof. Hopfield developed a network that can use incomplete patterns to find the most similar ones.

The Nobel Prize Committee said the two scientists’ work has become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.

But Ellen Moons, chairwoman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said: “Its rapid development has also raised concerns about our shared future.”

The winners will share prize money worth 11 million Swedish krona (£810,000).

When Prof Hinton resigned from Google last year, he told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “pretty scary”.

He also said at the time that his age played a role in his decision to leave the tech giant.

Earlier this year, in an interview with BBC Newsnight, he said the UK government needed to introduce a universal basic income to deal with AI’s impact on inequality, as he was “very concerned that AI could take away a lot of everyday jobs”.

He added that while AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “rather than the people whose jobs will be lost, and that will be very bad for society.”

In the same interview, he said developments over the last year showed governments were unwilling to curb military use of AI, while competition to develop products quickly risked tech companies “not putting enough effort into security.” would undertake”.

Prof Hinton said: “I estimate that in five to 20 years we are half as likely to have to face the problem of AI trying to take over.”

• 2023 – Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for work on attoseconds – extremely short light pulses that can be used to record and study fast processes inside atoms;

• 2022 – Alain Aspect, the American John Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger for research into quantum mechanics – the science that describes nature on the smallest scales;

• 2021 – Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi received the prize for advancing our understanding of complex systems such as Earth’s climate;

• 2020 – Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez received the prize for their work on the nature of black holes;

• 2019 – James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz shared the prize for groundbreaking discoveries about the universe;

• 2018 – Donna Strickland, Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou were awarded the prize for their discoveries in the field of laser physics.