Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton Awarded Nobel Prizes

Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in creating the modern field of deep learning. This will strengthen his reputation as the “Godfather of AI” which was already used to amplify his public statements about AI risk.[1]

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Demis Hassabis, Deepmind’s co-founder and CEO, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in creating AlphaFold.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 was divided, one half awarded to David Baker “for computational protein design”, the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.

AlphaFold’s extraordinary contributions to the field of computational biology are relatively undisputed, but the relevance of neural networks to physics has led to some discussions. Nevertheless, it can be said that AI-related research scored two Nobel Prizes, which corresponds to the credit and attention AI currently receives in the public eye.

Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for the discovery of miRNA. This year’s Nobel Prizes in Literature and Peace are yet to be awarded.[2]

  1. ^

    The media attention also amplifies many other remarks too (e.g. takes on Trump and AI or UBI).

    I also remember being disappointed by the lack of depth behind his public claims about AI, though it might have been caused by the reporting filter.

    I haven’t spent much time on this but it’s not clear to me what his concrete recommendations are or which policy proposals would he would support.

  2. ^

    Will ChatGPT complete the trio? Sam Altman would be a very funny Literature laureate : )