WBack in 2011, Marc Andreessen was a venture capitalist with dreams of becoming a public intellectual. published an essay Titled “Why Software is Eating the World,'', he predicted that computer code would take over large swaths of the economy. Now, 13 years later, the software seems to be making its way into academia. In any case, this is one possible conclusion to be drawn from the fact that computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton shares the following about 2024: Nobel Prize in Physics John Hopfield and computer scientist Demis Hassabis share half of it. Nobel Prize in Chemistry With one of my colleagues at DeepMind, John Jumper.

In some ways, Hassabis and Jumper's awards were as expected. Because they built the machine. alpha fold 2 – This will enable researchers to solve one of the most difficult problems in biochemistry: predicting the structure of proteins, the building blocks of biological life. Their machine was able to predict the structure of virtually every 200m protein the researchers identified. So this is a big problem for chemistry.

But Hinton is not a physicist. Indeed, he once Introduced at an academic conference As someone who “failed physics, dropped out of psychology, and then joined a field with absolutely no standards: artificial intelligence.” After graduating, I worked as a carpenter for a year. But he's the guy who found a way to do it (“backpropagationThis allows neural networks to be trained. This was one of the two keys that opened the door to machine learning and sparked the current AI frenzy. (The other is transformer model (published by Google researchers in 2017).

But where's the physics in this? That's from Mr. Hopfield, who shares the award with Mr. Hinton. “Hopfield networks and their further development, called Boltzmann machines, are based on physics,” Hinton explained to the man. new york times. “Hopfield nets used energy functions and Boltzmann machines used ideas from statistical physics. So that stage of the development of neural networks relied heavily on ideas from physics.”

that's ok. But the media often describes Hinton as the “godfather of AI,” which has vaguely sinister overtones. In reality, he is the exact opposite: tall, affable, polite, intelligent, and endowed with an acerbic and sometimes acerbic wit. When I asked Cade Metz how he reacted when he heard the news of the award, he said he was “shocked, surprised, and appalled,” which I think most people would say. But in 2018, he shared the Turing Award, computer science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, with Joshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their work in deep learning. So he was always in the top league. It's just that there is no Nobel Prize in computer science. Given the way software is eating up the world, perhaps that should change.

There's an old joke that the key to becoming a Nobel Prize winner is to “outlive” your rivals. Hinton, now 77, clearly took notice. But in fact, what is most admirable about him is his persistence in believing in the potential of neural networks as the key to artificial intelligence, long after the idea had been discredited by the profession. Given the way academia works, it required an extraordinary amount of determination and confidence, especially in a rapidly developing field like computer science. Perhaps what drove him through his dark times was the idea that his great-grandfather was George Boole, the 19th century mathematician who invented the underlying logic. all Of this digital stuff.

We also think about the impact awards have on people. When news of Hinton's award broke, I thought of Seamus Heaney, who won the literary prize in 1995. He described the experience as “like being attacked by something.” generally “A benign avalanche.” Note that I say “almost.” One of the consequences of the Nobel Prize is that the recipient instantly becomes public property, and everyone wants a piece of it. “All I'm doing these days is 'going to work,'” Heaney wrote resignedly to a friend in June 1996. And this situation will continue for weeks and months yet… Whatever the final outcome of the Stockholm effect, its direct result is the desire to quit and start over. with a unique persona (within myself)”

So…note to Jeff: Congratulations. And manage your calendar.

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