Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology that is currently being talked about with Malaysia receiving positive momentum through the construction of data centers worth tens of billions of Ringgit. But all this might not have happened without the efforts of early pioneers of machine learning technology John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton
These two researchers have been announced as winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024 for their fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Geoffrey Hinton, a professor from the University of Toronto, is an individual who has been named the "Father of AI" through his early research on building a neural network similar to the human brain using a computer. He warned about the dangers of using AI after abruptly resigning from Google last year.
His research allows computers to understand data that can then be provided to users who request it. It forms the basis of language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT which are used by over 350 million users every month.
John Hopfield from Princeton University used Hinton's research to build a neural network that stores images as they are stored in the human brain. His research became the basis for artificial intelligence in Google Photos that can understand the context of pictures and find specific information in pictures like in Microsoft Recall.
These two scientists shared a prize of 11 million Swedish Kronor (~RM 4.6 million).