Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer and figurehead of doomerism, wins Nobel Prize

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Hinton shares the award with fellow computer scientist John Hopfield, who invented a kind of pattern-matching neural network that would store and reconstruct data. Hinton built on this technology, generally known as a Hopfield network, to develop backpropagation, an algorithm that lets neural networks learn.

Hopfield and Hinton borrowed methods from physics, especially statistical techniques, to develop their approaches. Within the words of the Nobel Prize committee, the pair are recognized “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

But since May 2023, when helped break the news that Hinton was now fearful of the technology that he had helped bring about, the 76-year-old scientist has grow to be significantly better generally known as a figurehead for doomerism—the concept there’s a really real risk that near-future AI could precipitate catastrophic events, as much as and including human extinction.  

Doomerism wasn’t latest, but Hinton—who won the Turing Award, the highest prize in computing science, in 2018—brought latest credibility to a position that lots of his peers once considered kooky.

What led Hinton to talk out? After I met with him in his London home last yr, Hinton told me that he was awestruck by what latest large language models could do. OpenAI’s latest flagship model, GPT-4, had been released a number of weeks before. What Hinton saw convinced him that such technology—based on deep learning—would quickly grow to be smarter than humans. And he was apprehensive about what motivations it could have when it did.  

“I actually have suddenly switched my views on whether this stuff are going to be more intelligent than us,” he told me on the time. “I feel they’re very near it now they usually can be way more intelligent than us in the longer term. How can we survive that?”

Hinton’s views set off a months-long media buzz and made the sort of existential risks that he and others were imagining (from economic collapse to genocidal robots) into mainstream concerns. A whole lot of top scientists and tech leaders signed open letters warning of the disastrous downsides of artificial intelligence. A moratorium on AI development was floated. Politicians assured voters they’d do what they might to forestall the worst.

Despite the excitement, many consider Hinton’s views to be fantastical. Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta and Hinton’s fellow recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, has called doomerism “preposterously ridiculous.”

Today’s prize rewards foundational work in a technology that has grow to be a part of on a regular basis life. Additionally it is sure to shine an excellent brighter light on Hinton’s more scaremongering opinions.

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