Canadian AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton ‘flabbergasted’ after winning Nobel Prize

Geoffrey Hinton, the British Canadian computer scientist whose machine learning discoveries have proved so profound he’s known as the “godfather of AI,” has won the Nobel Prize in physics.

The honour was bestowed Tuesday on Hinton, 76, and Princeton University researcher John Hopfield, 91, by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It chose to award the pair because their use of physics had uncovered patterns in information that laid the foundation for machine learning and neural networks.

Machine learning is a form of computer science that relies on data and algorithms to help artificial intelligence mimic how humans learn, while neural networks are models that emulate the human brain by learning from data and detecting patterns. Both technologies underpin artificial intelligence, which provides the framework for devices and systems used across every industry around the world.

Hinton initially told the academy he was “flabbergasted” by news of his win, which he later said reached him around 1 a.m., after he had slept for just an hour.

He was at a “cheap” hotel in California, where he was due to receive an MRI, which he quipped he’d now have to cancel. He initially thought the call from the academy was “a spoof,” but later realized it had to be real because it was placed from Sweden and the speaker had a “strong Swedish accent.”

At an evening press conference, Hinton indicated the shock of the award still hadn’t worn off.

“I had absolutely no idea that I had even been nominated,” he said.

“I dropped out of physics after my first year at university because I couldn’t do the complicated math, so getting an award in physics was very surprising to me.”

After calling his sister in Australia to break the news to her, he said he spent most of the day responding to congratulatory messages but had also started to give some thought to what he will do with his half of the Nobel Prize money — 11 million Swedish kronor (about C$1.45 million) he and Hopfield will split.

Hinton said his share of the bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, is headed for charity, including one organization he did not name but said provides jobs to neurodiverse young adults.

Hinton’s Nobel win stands to bolster his legacy as an AI pioneer and lend additional credibility to his recent warnings about the technology’s risks.

He first caught the scientific community’s attention in the 1980s, when he was working as a professor at the University of Toronto. Co-laureate Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images in data, but Hinton then uncovered a way to find properties in data and identify specific elements in pictures and developed a “backpropagation” technique that helps train machines to “learn.”

His work has ultimately “become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said.

It has also shaped companies as big as Google, to which Hinton sold his neural networks startup DNNresearch in 2013.

Five years later, he garnered even more attention, winning the A.M. Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, with fellow Canadian Yoshua Bengio and American Yan LeCun.

Bengio was a grad student when Hopfield and Hinton made several of their breakthroughs in the eighties.

“It changed really the meaning of AI for me and it made me really excited about working on neural networks because it not only brought concepts from physics into AI, which is really cool, but it also brought a broader, maybe more important idea,” Bengio recalled.

“In the same way that in physics, we are able to explain what is going on with a few simple mathematical equations, we could do the same to understand intelligence … and that was not at all a common view.”

When Bengio met Hinton years later, he saw the Nobel winner as a “role model.”

“He’s the kind of person who has a new idea a day,” Bengio said. “Very creative, very insightful, but also a real scholar (because) he’s interested in everything.”

However, Bengio recalls it was hard to drum up attention for Hinton’s work for many decades because other technologies were seen as more promising and popular. That all changed in recent years, especially when ChatGPT was released in November 2022. The AI chatbot meant everyone from students looking to cut corners on homework to tech giants wanting to boost profits were racing to innovate with machine learning.

It created a pivotal moment for Hinton, who began to have worries about the technology that has been his life’s work.

He quit his role as vice-president and engineering fellow at Google last spring so he could speak more freely about AI, which he fears could result in lethal autonomous weapons, discrimination, unemployment, misinformation and even the demise of humanity.

Yet he hasn’t ditched the technology.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement, referring to the chatbot’s latest model.

“I don’t totally trust it, because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything, it’s a not very good expert.”

Hinton isn’t directly involved with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, but the company is a sign of just how far his influence in the tech industry extends; its co-founder was one of the students he won the ImageNet computer vision competition with in 2012.

Other Hinton proteges include Cohere’s co-founders Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst. Gomez called Hinton “a real hero for our field and for Canada” and Frosst said “his passion for discovery and invention will always be an inspiration, but his kindness, playfulness and mentorship have benefited me most.”

Frosst met Hinton at U of T, where Hinton is a professor emeritus, but the Nobel winner also serves as a chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute in Toronto.

In congratulating Hinton, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland called him “the teacher of generations of great Canadian intellectual leaders,” while U of T president Meric Gertler said the school was “immensely proud of his historic accomplishment.”

Tony Gaffney, Vector’s president and CEO, said Hinton’s “pioneering research at the University of Toronto not only revolutionized the field of AI but has also been instrumental in establishing Canada as a global powerhouse in AI research and innovation.”

— With files from Craig Wong and Dylan Robertson in Ottawa and Jordan Omstead in Toronto.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press