Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton Issues Warning After Nobel Double Win for AI
Artificial Intelligence Has Truly Gone Mainstream

The Age of AI is truly upon us.
In yet another sign that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken centre stage, Princeton University professor John Hopfield and University of Toronto professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in physics just recently, while AI researchers University of Washingtonâs David Baker and Google DeepMindâs Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize.
Hopfield and Hinton, largely credited for their pioneering work in AI, were given the prestigious award for having âused tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of todayâs powerful machine learning,â according to the Nobel committee. Baker, Hassabis, and Jumper, on the other hand, were awarded for developing an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem on predicting the complex structures of proteins, which are the building blocks of life.
Hopfield and Hinton: The Forefathers of AI
Hopfield is credited for inventing the Hopfield network, a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns, according to the Nobel Prize press release announcing Hopfield and Hintonâs award.
âThe Hopfield network utilises physics that describes a materialâs characteristics due to its atomic spinâa property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by finding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy,â the press release read. âWhen the Hopfield network is fed a distorted or incomplete image, it methodically works through the nodes and updates their values so the networkâs energy falls. The network thus works stepwise to find the saved image that is most like the imperfect one it was fed with.â
Hinton, on the other hand, was lauded for building upon the Hopfield network and introducing the Boltzmann machine, which âcan learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data.â
âHinton used tools from statistical physics, the science of systems built from many similar components. The machine is trained by feeding it examples that are very likely to arise when the machine is run,â the same press release explained. âThe Boltzmann machine can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of pattern on which it was trained. Hinton has built upon this work, helping initiate the current explosive development of machine learning.â
Indeed, that development has been explosive to say the least, with AI-focused companies expanding to all corners of the globe, as is the case with OpenAI, which recently announced plans to open an office in Singapore to go along with its offices in San Francisco, USA; Dublin, Ireland; London, Great Britain; and Tokyo, Japan. Incidentally, OpenAIâs ChatGPT, which arguably set off this massive AI wave we are experiencing, just turned two recently and looks here to stay, according to David Irecki, Chief Technology Officer for APJ at Boomi.
Geoffrey Hintonâs Hint: Beware of Uncharted AI Landscape
Among these recent Nobel recipients, Geoffrey Hinton is of course the most recognisable, having been part of Google in the last decade and building what The New York Times described as the âintellectual foundation for the AI systems that the tech industryâs biggest companies believe is a key to their future.â But Hinton left Google last year, largely to speak out against what he perceives as the dangers of AI.
âIt is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,â Hinton told The New York Times last year in a lengthy interview, where he also expressed regret at having laid the building blocks of todayâs AI.
A year later, it appears he has not changed his mind about AIâeven after getting this prestigious honour from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In an open call after the Nobel Prize announcement, Hinton lauded the potential impact of AI, which he said âwould be comparable with the Industrial Revolution” and âwonderful in many aspects.â Even so, he warned of potential ramifications.
“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,â said Hinton. âIt’s going to be wonderful in many respects, but we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
And really, Hinton might be on to something. He warned us all, and now we are seeing that those warnings should be taken seriously, especially with AI being increasingly used by criminal syndicates and AI-generated deepfakes worsening online fraud.
The Unchecked AI Hype?
It might come off as negativism, but Hintonâs vision of an out-of-control AI is beginning to become a distinct possibility given the snowballing hype around it. This double win at the Nobel will only add to that hypeâand might even convince todayâs brightest scientists to explore this innovation more after the de facto validation it got from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
This double win for AI has not sat well with some members of the scientific community, with a few questioning, in particular, the decision to honour Hopfield and Hinton when AI falls more under the purview of computer science instead of physics.
âIâm speechless. I like machine learning and artificial neural networks as much as the next person, but hard to see that this is a physics discovery,â Imperial College London astrophysicist Jonathan Pritchard wrote on X. âGuess the Nobel got hit by AI hype.â
Of course, this isn’t to say that Hinton, Hopfield, Baker, Hassabis, and Jumperâand their groundbreaking work in AIâaren’t deserving of this prestigious recognition. Regardless of distinctions in subject areas, their contributions merit applause, and many in the scientific community certainly agree. The bigger question here is: How do we make sure Hintonâs fear of an out-of-control AI does not bite us when all is said and done?
But, at the moment, it appears Geoffrey Hinton has every right to worry. Maybe we should, too.