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...