Recognition for Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton marks moment when important ingredients came together It was more than even the most ardent advocates expected. After all the demonstrations of superhuman prowess, and the debates over whether the technology was humanity’s best invention yet or its surest route to self-destruction, artificial intelligence landed a Nobel prize this week. And then it landed another. First came the physics prize. The American John Hopfield and the British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won for foundational work on artificial neural networks, the computational architecture that underpins modern AI such as ChatGPT. Then came the chemistry prize, with half handed to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at Google DeepMind. Their AlphaFold program solved a decades-long scientific challenge by predicting the structure of all life’s proteins. Continue reading...

Researchers say their creation has memory, which it can use to perform better by gaining experience Researchers have found a soft and squidgy water-rich gel is not only able to play the video game Pong, but gets better at it over time. The findings come almost two years after brain cells in a dish were taught how to play the 1970s classic, a result the researchers involved said showed “something that resembles intelligence”. Continue reading...