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, called “the godfather of artificial intelligence”, said he was amazed.
He resigned from Google in 2023 and warned of the dangers of machines that can outsmart humans.
The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
91-year-old Hopfield is a professor at Princeton University in the USA, and 76-year-old Hinton - at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Machine learning is key to artificial intelligence because it shows how a computer can learn to generate information.
It powers a wide range of technologies we use today, from how we search the web to editing photos on our phones.
„I had no idea this was going to happen. I'm very surprised,” Prof. Hinton said, speaking by phone with the Academy minutes after the announcement.
He said he was in a hotel with bad internet in California and thought he might have to cancel the rest of his plans for the day.
The academy listed some of the key applications of the two scientists' work, including improving climate modeling, solar cell development and medical image analysis.
Prof Hinton's pioneering research on neural networks paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.
In the field of artificial intelligence, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they receive and process information. They allow AI to learn from experience as a human would. This is called deep learning.
Prof. Hinton said his work on artificial neural networks was revolutionary.
„It will be like the Industrial Revolution – but instead of our physical abilities, it will exceed our intellectual ones”, he said.
But he said he also has concerns about the future when asked if he regrets his life's work.
"I would do the same job again, but I worry that the general effects of this might be systems that are smarter than us that could eventually take over”.
He also said he uses ChatGPT4 for a lot of things now, but with the knowledge that it doesn't always give the right answer.
Professor John Hopfield invented a network that can save and recreate patterns.
It uses physics that describes the properties of a material due to atomic spin.
In a similar way to how the brain tries to remember words by using related but incomplete words, Prof Hopfield has developed a network that can use incomplete patterns to find the most similar ones.
The Nobel Prize committee said the work of the two scientists has become part of our everyday lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.
But Ellen Munns, chair of the Nobel Physics Committee, said "rapid development has also raised concerns about our collective future.
The winners share a prize fund worth SEK 11 million (£810,000).
When Prof Hinton resigned from Google last year, he told the BBC that some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”.
At the time, he also indicated 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 would need to introduce a universal basic income to tackle the impact of AI on inequality, as he was “very worried that AI will take over many public jobs”.
He added that while AI will increase productivity and profits, the money will go to the rich “not to the people whose jobs are being lost and that will be very bad for society”.
In the same interview, he said that developments over the past year show that governments are unwilling to rein in the military use of AI, while competition to rapidly develop products means there is a risk that tech companies are not “putting enough effort into safety&rdquo ;.
Professor Hinton suggests that in five to 20 years we are half as likely to face the problem of AI trying to take over.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk