I'm surprised Terry Sejnowski isn't included, considering it seems to be for Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines, where Terry played a large role in the latter.
Did Hinton win for the restricted Boltzmann machine? I believe Paul Smolensky has some priority with the Harmonium, but Hinton certainly deserves it. But worth reading Smolensky’s paper, it is a classic!! https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP8...
Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
I wonder if they ever gave a Physics Nobel to a person who held a patent! People like Graham Bell never got recognized by the Nobel people. I get the impression that Physics Nobel prizes were more or less given only to University professors. They didnt seem to particularly care for people with grease on their hands
This prize is more of a settler colonialist land grab by physicists. ML is just a subfield of physics (like every other field), so let's make sure that everyone knows that it's in our domain.
it already had, bottom-quark tagging has improved O(10)x in efficiency in the last decade without any new "physics" understanding, just from training with more low-level data and better ML arch (now using Transformers)
but we haven't found new physics with or without ML, making this prize a little weird.
I sort of agree in principle but in practise they've always taken a broad view.
Kissinger was one of the most prominent disrupters of world peace in the postwar era but that didn't stop him winning the peace prize. Churchill won the literature prize for defeating Hitler. The blue led guys a few years back didn't do much except make a thing that would go on every single consumer gadget and disrupt my sleep but they won the physics prize.
Even when they get it right they often get it wrong. For example I believe Einstein supposedly won for "especially his work on the photoelectric effect" rather than relativity.
Also, the prize is about the greatest benefit to humankind according to Alfred Nobel, not the most impressive research. Arguably, the photoelectric effect fits that notion better than GR or any other of Einstein's research.
Besides that, Einstein received the prize in 1921, whereas the Eddington experiment in 1919 generally counts as the first experimental verification of GR.
Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect was incredibly important, and incredibly influential on other research at the time. He proposed that light was quantised - essentially the foundation of quantum mechanics.
It’s no exaggeration that Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect was as important as special or general relativity, and it had the advantage of strong experimental verification by 1921.
The main reason that prize is remarkable is that Einstein himself hated quantum mechanics - but that doesn’t dispute the work’s importance.
Nobel prizes are generally awarded for verifiable observations but, also require real world applications.
Einstein won the physics prize on the photoelectric effect due to having real world applications and observable and if GPS actually existed while he was arrived (yes I know this is a stretch) he would have gotten it for relativity.
Blue LEDs allows you to access more of the color spectrum for LEDs in general and they were not easy to make.
For this year it does feel like a very large leaning into practical applications instead of physics though. Did we run out of interesting physics in the last year?
I'm sure they are but they drive me nuts. If I ever become filthy rich and in doing so sell my soul and become a bad person, one of my priorities will doubtless be to have the blue led inventors hunted down remorselessly.[1]
[1] Note to future law-enforcement: I am honestly kidding. I wouldn't hurt a fly, officer.
A black sharpie over the offending led indicators can fix your problems. Now you can enjoy your sleep uninterrupted by dreams of faustian bargains and manhunts.
One of the very early successful applications of ML was using neural network and other models in particle identification systems in particle physics experiments.
More to do with neuroscience than you think. Fukushima took direct inspiration from Hubel & Wiesel's nobel prize in the 1960s when developing the neocognitron, which turned into convolutional neural networks. Hopfield networks are a model for associative memory. And, well, then there is the perceptron. There was always a link and mutual inspiration.
Except that the development of deep neural networks took direct inspiration biological neuroscience with neurons and synapses. Neural is even in the name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning
People always repeat these stupid things like they're lore. Ok let's suppose this is true. What else is true is that neurology itself was inspired by phrenology and the practice of exorcisms. Should we now start recognizing and exalting those connections given how divorced modern (useful!) neurology is?
The response of the physicists they say should get a slap is, in programming terms, basically shut up and show me the code. It's a fairly one sided debate that we're blessed with seeing in literally every thread anywhere about it
The computation of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations hasn't received a nobel prize yet. It's had a deep impact on how we understand the Universe.
Some people still alive who made important contributions to this are Rees and Sunyaev.
Exoplanet science is not physics, it's chemistry or planetary science. By your logic prizes to teams who send probes to the outer solar system planets could also be given prizes.
What's "exoplanet science"? The above are applications of knowledge of physics to astrophysics, as far as I understand it. Certainly they sound more relevant to physics than neural networks.
I would argue that the first measurements of exoplanets' existence is definitely physics. This was a leap in our understanding of the makeup of the universe.
Congrats to the laureates! Maybe a Computing prize should be created though, like Nobel did not create the "nobel prize of economy".Though you could argue that Computing is Math? What are computer scientists usually awarded with?
I don't think Geoff Hinton is in the running for a Fields medal[1] any more, unless they did what they did for Andrew Wiles and give him a "quantized" Fields medal.
Most commenters here don't know that Boltzmann machines and associative memories existed in condensed matter physics long before they were used in cognitive science or AI.
The Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glass is a Hopfield network with random initialization.
Boltzmann machine is Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model with external field.
This is price in physics given to novel use of stochastic spin-glass modelling. Unexpected, but saying this is not physics is not correct.
> but they have made no contribution to understanding physical laws or phenomena.
Neural networks are used in tons of data pipelines for physics experiments, most notably with particle accelerators.
The Nobel Prize is also occasionally awarded to engineers who develop tools that are important parts of experiments. 2018 for example was awarded for chirped pulse amplification, which is probably best known for being used in LASIK eye surgery, but it is also used in experimental pipelines.
> Neural networks are used in tons of data pipelines for physics experiments
With this argument you could even say Bill Gates should get an award for inventing Windows and popularized the desktop computer... Or at least Linus Torvalds since those pipelines are probably running Linux...
Not really related to physics per sec, but to let physicist to get out of research in physics. The most self-denial award ever. But machine learning deserve a prize. Just this … anyway congratulations
Former high energy theorist here: things are not looking so good for high energy physics (both theoretical and experimental) which loosely speaking accounted for maybe 1/3-1/2 of Nobel Prizes in the 20th century. That’s part of the reason I got out. I’m inclined to say astrophysics and cosmology, another pillar of the fundamental understanding of the universe, isn’t doing that well either, probably in the okayish but not as exciting as it used to be territory. I’m not qualified to talk about other fields.
I think saying they're not looking good might be a bit of an exaggeration. Technological developments in both high energy physics and astrophysics stuff are in-between generations of technology right now, which is why things are a bit slower than usual.
With astrophysics, we're probably going to need the more sensitive gravitational wave detectors that are in development to become operational for new big breakthroughs. With high energy physics, many particle colliders and synchrotron light sources seem to be undergoing major upgrades these days. While particle colliders tend to get the spotlight in the public eye and are in a weird spot regarding the expected research outcomes, light sources are still doing pretty well afaik.
This Nobel I think is mainly because AI has overwhelmingly dominated the public's perception of scientific/technological progress this year.
As a layman, the visualization of black holes, the superstructure above and below the Milky Way, JWST’s distant galaxy discoveries, gravitational wave detectors as mentioned, and some of the Kuiper Belt observations all seem to be interesting and exciting.
"theoretical physics" is such a big and ambiguous concept that physicists tend not to use the word in discussions. Thereotical work often involves a lot of numerical simulation on super computers these days which are kind of their own "experiments". And it is usually more productive to just mention the specific field, e.g. astronomy, condensed matter, AMO etc, and you can be sure there is always a lot of discoveries in each area.
Physics is not stuck in string theory as physics is not just high energy theoretical particle physics. There's also more going on in high energy theoretical particle physics than just "string theory".
Much of the experimental action in recent decades has been in low energy theoretical particle physics. Down near absolute zero, where quantum effects dominate and many of the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics can be observed directly. The Nobel Prizes in physics for 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, and 2003 were all based on experimental work down near absolute zero.
Please bro just one more collider. Just one more collider bro. I swear bro we're gonna fix physics forever. Just one more collider bro. We could go up or even underground. Please bro just one more collider.
I've always sided with Feynman on this, and this proves him right: wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement?
It brings the award into disrepute, or at least in a Feynman way, exposes the inherent disreputability of awards themselves: who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics?
Awards committees: self-serving self-appointed cliques of prestige chasers
>> Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee) we don't get to have that.
I think first you're underestimating "laypeople" which seems to include many scientists who are not physicists, and second you are forgetting that many of the scientists the "lay" public knows as the greatest of all times never received a Nobel, or any other famous prize: Einstein, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, etc etc.
Neither for relativity nor mass-energy equivalence though, which laypeople are much more likely to know about than the photoelectric effect (what the price was actually awarded for).
The economics of this topic have always been interesting to me, especially when compared to various other fields. What is there to incentivize people to enter STEM fields, and especially research?
As a point of comparison, there are ~540 premier league football players, with an average salary of 3.5 million pounds. (Yes, that's average, not median, but there's less than 20 of them that earn under 200k.) It's not _that_ exclusive of a club, and the remuneration is insanely disproportionate, compared to academics - I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning millions.
So, yes, it's pretty odd to have some random people dish out these prizes, and they are a drop in the pond. However, I personally feel it's way too little, and that the targets of the prizes are far more deserving - even if it's a popularity contest - than random entertainers (even if they are quite entertaining). But, it's up for argument, and the markets obviously don't seem to agree with me.
"I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning millions." -- by doing purely academic research, maybe not. But, the number of people who have moved from academia to industry off the strength of their research and made millions is probably much larger than you think. I'd wager just in ML you could round up a few hundred between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, NVidia, Meta/FAIR, etc.
Weirdly, if you sniff the XHR from [0] (when it loads a new page), it claims there's 1171 players for 24/25. Except if you look at a few of the teams individually, they're between 30-35 players. Which is much more in line with your ~540 than their 1171.
> the remuneration is insanely disproportionate
I once pointed out that Kevin De Bruyne, on his own, gets paid almost half as much (~21M) as the entire salary cap of the Rugby Union Premiership (~2022, 50M) (to make the point there's much more money in football than rugby.)
If Physicists could split atoms with only their arms and legs with some safety equipment, I bet they would get paid even more than 3.5 million pound salary.
Even though the many of the Oscars nowadays feel rigged (with full lobbying arms from the studios behind them), my understanding was that the "Academy" (from the Academy Awards) consists mostly of your fellow filmmakers.
So it is an honor bestowed by your peers, the ones who would most appreciate the quality of the work and the work that went into it.
When the most significant advance since electrification needs to hop the fence to be recognized, perhaps it's time to add a new field. It can be done, the Economics prize was added in 1968.
Well, society would collapse without computers so I think the description is apt.
At best you could argue that they're the same phenomenon, but then you might equally well argue electrification is just the consequence of steam engines.
The economics prize is not an actual Nobel prize, but something "inspired" by the Nobel prize. It's little more than a tool to push neoliberal policies to the public, with 34 of the 56 winners tied to the Chicago School of Economics.
What matters for an award is that people recognise it as a prestigious accolade.
The economics prize, while not “official”, is still recognised by everyone in economics as the highest honour in the field. Who cares if it’s “official” or not?
Awards and prizes derive their value from their social recognition, which it has a solid amount of, at the very least.
There is nothing wrong with their connection with dynamite. Nobel designed it to prevent deaths in construction and mining, because nitroglycerine was way too dangerous (and way too useful to be abandoned). It's bad reputation comes from it's use in warfare, which is undeserved because it was not very well suited to that use and was quickly replaced by other solid explosives.
IMO Turing Award is plenty prestigious - and has more legitimacy as its awarded by the relevant community (ACM) - rather than some small group (the Swedish Academy of Sciences) - tbh on that vein I'd say the right thing to do is to ditch the Nobel and let each community in the relevant field decide as a community the work to honor - prevent fiascos like this.
(and, working in the field, I completely disagree with the qualification as "most ...." - it has well known deficiencies and has not yet stood the test of time)
Sincerely, I don't like a shadow cast over the Turing and Gödel prizes. These awards have long honored groundbreaking achievements in computing and logic.
This is unlikely to ever happen, because Nobel explicitly excluded mathematics from the list of prizes in his will. There are plenty of awards and prizes for every field imaginable, not everything has to be a Nobel prize to be worthy of recognition.
There was at least a credible story of fission/fusion for the benefit of humanity. Here, we know that AI is primarily used for target systems, surveillance, opinion manipulation, slop content, etc. If AGI ever succeeds it will be used for eliminating all knowledge jobs.
Nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Do you think that systems like Lavender won't be used in the future? Zero chance.
Feynman would voice his objections if he were alive ... what about nature was discovered? ANN is an application of a variant of Universal Approximation Theorem ...
Feynman was a well-known proponent of AI and neural networks [1]. He even gave popular lectures on the subject [2]. He also claimed that replicating animal-like visual recognition abilities in machines would be Nobel-worthy; deep learning was certainoy a breakthrough in that.
"This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning."
Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded for discoveries in the _physical world_?
I studied physics in the 90s and we had an NNs course, where most of the models were inspired by physics (MLPs was just one). NNs have been used since decades for identifying e.g. the trajectories of particles at CERN. I remember Hinton's work with Sejnowski (who probably should also be awarded). I was actually surprised to find out that Hinton was not a physicist by training
Obviously physicists take great interest in models of the brain or models of intelligence. All of physics is modeling , after all
Not all modelling is physics, but a rather large part of modeling is. My PhD is in complex systems, and you would be surprised by the range of systems we did study. My work was on a more "traditional" field of high dimension fractal surfaces, but we had a student working on public transit models, another on ecological pattern formation, and so on.
At least the somewhat free interpretation of field boundaries is nothing new. The physicist Rutherford ("All science is either Physics or stamp collecting")[1]
won the Chemistry Nobel Prize.
Influence and consideration of the Zeitgeist is also nothing new. Einstein got his prize for the discovery of the Photoelectric Effect and not Relativity.
[1] I know that some people have interpreted this quote in favor of the other sciences but I think that is far fetched.
The Society for Birdology now has the pleasure of jointly awarding posthumously Plato and Diogenes with the Distinguished Birdologist Award. Their findings on human anatomy used insights from birdology at critical points. Well done, lads!
> Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine?
Yes I think it does. But those planes would have to create one hell of a buzz!
Hm, they have to fit them into Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, or Peace. I guess physics is the closest they can get without a gross missplacement? (Although you might be able to absue literature for LLMs?)
It's definitely not how "they" work. It's not like a committee choosing an achievement across all the fields and then trying to put it into one of the 5 buckets.
We have Turning Award, Fields Award and the other thousands of awards for achievements that can't be categorized as Physics/Biology/Economics/Chemistry.
I think that you can grow mathematics through applied mathematics. It's something that grows the domain where Mathematics is useful, even though the maths themselves where known and somewhat well understood in a more abstract way.
Considering this, it feels odd not to allow a similar thing to happen on physics.
But, the starting point of Neural Networks in the ML/AI sense, is cybernetics + Rosenblatt's perceptron, research done mathematicians (who became early computer scientists)
That's why I wrote that it was unexpected.I'm not taking position of if this was deserved or undeserved, but this was clearly in the realm of physics and inspired by it.
Accepting wrong arguments in support of positions you have is not good way to live your life. It leads to constipation.
I IS a physics problem. Non physicists tend of think that the only areas being studied are high energy and/or cosmology, but modern physics covers a multitude of areas, including complex systems.
Does that mean that computer scientists who do neural network research should be considered physicists? Do physics journals accept submissions on neural networks research under the same justification?
This is such a tired reply. The peace prize is not part of the same group as the other awards, and a significant difference in the peace award is that intent is awarded not results.
The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award despite nuke deterrance doctrice being related to the least amount of wars in any century since WW2.
But his platform of deescalation and his plans for american foregin diplomacy were rewarded. He ultimately failed to reach those goals (specially with the escalation on Afghanistan and the emergence of groups like ISIS), but tbh the Iran agreement and the Pacific trade agreement, killed and buried by the next administration, would have created a massive buffer and solution for the 2 hotspots we currently experience around the middle east (where terrorism is largely sponsored by Iran) and the Taiwan takeover by the CCP (would also be partially neutralised by the Pacific trade talks).
He was naive, in the way the world was naive to the ability to sacrifice prosperity that some leaders are capable of. He underestimated how dumb and suicidal putin could be, he underestimated how much China would be willing to sacrifice in terms of potential, he underestimated how much violence was latent and capable in the middle east. but his nobel peace prize was due to his campaign running on nuclear proliferation treaties and closer relationships with the muslim world which had been entirely antagonistic since Bush
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The award shouldn't have been given for intentions, before he even did anything. We should not reward promises, but action. Even a long term member of the committee expressed regret in them giving it to Obama.
He received it before any of that. And Libya does actually cancel every point you mention by the way. Because it's actually not hard to have presidents not start wars at all- both presidents since Obama did just that.
And if the real Nobel prize doesn't want the confusion around its name to happen... it should do something about it?
> The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award
No, he didn't win the award, because MAD doctrine (aside from it being immoral) doesn't actually work in the real world.
It's an idealized model based on game theory, which doesn't deal with pesky complexities such as irrationality, salami tactics, short-range CBMs, anti-missile defenses, tactical nukes and so on. (That's why many of these things used to be banned by treaties, to continue to pretend that MAD is actually required for peace. In reality many nations do not have nukes and live in peace.)
In addition to the other replies, he is the only US president in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen without a trial, and create a legal doctrine allowing future presidents to do so; and he was the major escalator of the use of drone strikes in war (the practice started with Bush, but it expanded many fold under Obama).
> […] [Obama] is the only US president in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen without a trial
Just one of the many things Obama did that upsets me so much. The precedent he set with that is criminal.
Of course I’m against terrorism, but our government MUST NOT have the right to classify Americans as terrorists and just execute them without a trial—via drone strikes!
Most Americans likely don’t even know about what happened to the al-Awlaki’s, which is unfortunate.
Just because those countries could not realistically engage in a war with the US, seeing as they lack the necessary technology. Obviously, if you shoot fish in a barrel you're not starting a war with the fish, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing much to advance peace with the fish.
Tangential to your question but not the premise of this subthread/post - he became president in Feb 2009 and got the award in October.
I don't think he started any new wars, but he inherited some and continued. Anyway, the point here should be the absurdity of a lot of Nobel awards and that stands - especially in his case.
I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake! More than 2 or 3 times iirc. So anyway.
I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake
Being nominated only means that one of thousands of people allowed to nominated candidates wrote your name on a piece of paper and mailed it in. There is at least one right wing Swedish politician who's been sending in Trumps name every year for a while now.
The Nobel peace prize committee is not really responsible for nominating candidates[1], only for selecting a winner from the list of nominated candidates.
[1] Although I believe they are allowed to suggest names.
The Nobel peace prize is awarded by a different institution than the science ones. And there are hundreds of people that can nominate, doesn't mean that a nomination reflects anything upon the committee that awards the prize.
Each of the Nobel prizes is awarded by a different committee from a different organization. The Nobel Peace prize was established at the same time and in the same way as the Literature, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Chemistry prizes (through Alfred Nobel's will). Of course, by its nature, it is the most political of the prizes.
The only Nobel prize that is separate is the Economics one, which was established much later and has no connection to Alfred Nobel (it is paid for by Sweden's central bank instead of the Nobel estate). But even that one is administered by the same Nobel foundation.
Obama intervened in the Libyan civil war. The outcome was disastrous for Libya (13 years of chaos and counting, the entrance of ISIS into Libya, the re-emergence of slavery in Libya, to name a few consequences). Obama blatantly violated the War Powers Act, which requires the President to seek Congressional approval for any war waged abroad after 60 days. The act was passed on the tail end of the Vietnam War, to prevent a repeat of things like Nixon invading Cambodia in secret. The US Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but that power is absolutely meaningless if the President can just wage war wherever he chooses without a declaration.
Obama specifically won the Nobel Peace Prize for talking about his "vision of a world free from nuclear weapons" as a candidate. As President, he initiated a massive program to upgrade the US' nuclear arsenal. It made a complete mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize, though Kissinger also won the Nobel Peace Prize, so it's not as if the prize has any credibility anyways.
The outcome was positive for Libya, as it experienced only a fraction of human suffering compared to Syria where the United States did not intervene against the regime.
Either way Libya operation was spearheaded by France with Obama joining only reluctantly later.
Can you explain why starting a war (still ongoing), killing >10k people, and converting Africa's best functioning and richest country into one of the world's worst functioning places is positive outcome? I don't understand this.
The Syrian Civil war was clearly (in parts) engineered by the west. Here is some evidence.
The US intervened in both civil wars, though in Syria its involvement early on was much more through funding and arming of various armed groups - notably Sunni fundamentalist groups. How you can say that the outcome was positive for Libya is beyond me. The country was utterly destroyed. It went from being the one of the most developed countries in Africa to a war-torn country with competing warlords and open slave markets.
Human death toll in Libya and Syria differ by almost 60x. Half a million Syrians could have lived, the refugee crisis and the rise of far right in the West could be avoided had Assad been droned in 2013. Putin would also not have dared the 2014 annexation either.
Honestly it feels a bit weird with a Nobel laureate in physics who probably knows a lot less physics than even I* do… Makes me cringe a bit to be honest.
Also makes me sad when I think about all the physicists and engineers who have made the chips that can train multi-billion parameter neural networks possible. I mean the so-called “bitter lesson” of AI is basically “don’t bet against the physicists at ASML et al”. No prize for them?
(*) I have a humble masters in engineering physics, but work in ML and software.
I work in industry supporting these supply chains; our advancements are part of a hive mind that could be harmed if individuals were artificially highlighted for achievement.
The academics can have their awards, we smile seeing the world change a bit at a time.
Nothing wrong with picking some random people out of a hive mind. There seems to be some notable contributions around EUV for example [1].
And BTW, is the same not true for machine learning? I don’t think many have even read the Boltzmann machine paper. It’s basically a footnote in the history of deep learning. It has no practical significance today.
I think one can consider what AI will bring to the field of physics. Merit is quite deserving of math and science of building tools which will unlock potential discoveries from here into the future.
Despite all of the talk surrounding AI in the workforce/business world, I think it is actually most important in science.
But, this is more of a applied math than physics. There are many other scientist that contributed more towards understanding of quantum systems, e.g. Aharonov.
Also, as a tool, it has not been as useful as influential as they make it out to be, at least less influential than the work Aharonov in terms of increasing our understanding
I'm annoyed that he was awarded just now, obviously as a reaction to ChatGPT and the breakthrough of LLMs. If his work is worthy, it has been worthy many years ago.
This reinforces the reduction of ML to LLMs, just like the use of the term AI.
How do LeCun and Bengio feel about being left out of the most prestigous prize of them all? (Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio was together awarded the Turing prize in 2018...)
"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony."
It's propaganda for liberalism. It's just that at a certain point that propaganda became so successful, that you sound like a lunatic if you call it propaganda. Unfortunately there was no reason to make propaganda for Mathematics so they never got their own Nobel prize.
He also got it for being half black since by the cutoff date he'd been president for all of 11 days. Had they waited a year they would have had the pleasure of finding out he ordered 50% more drone strikes than Bush did.
I don't think there is a take I can disagree with more strongly. New technology can always be used for good or bad. His work in ML sets the course for a better future in spite of the people who use it for ill, whether advertisers or warlords.
Atomic bombs are a product of atomic energy. So are atomic energy, cancer treatment, electron microscopes, etc.
I disagree the negatives outweigh the positive. Spellcheck, Google maps traffic, and electricity distribution are three applications I've used this morning. We dont tend to think about the successful applications, instead focusing the solely negative use like adtech.
Many of those are unfulfilled promises of the type that have been around for 30 or 40 years at least. And climate modelling: what's the point? You can't predict climate change from history. That's the whole point of the research.
So then wait until those promises have been fulfilled, as has so often been the case in Nobel prizes. Remember Higgs?
But the negative effects have been clear. Might just as well give the Nobel Peace Prize to Zuckerberg.
I genuinely think there is potential for a silly Internet tradition here. Google should pick bunch of candidate winners by ML, hire them six months before, fire them all a week before awarding, and then programmatically re-hire moments before awarding. It can't be more malicious than most academic pranks and it shouldn't matter whether the conspiracy is real, it'll be just funny.
I think calling it a conspiracy theory is a bit of a stretch. I could be wrong. I agree that's how it should be. But I don't get the impression there are lot of fans of Google in the Prize Committee. Either way, it's not something that matters too much. Just a thought.
The age too, and the fact that Google lost prestige in AI over the years.
It's the company that didn't see the potential of Transformers, and that presented a half-assed Bard when LLMs were already in production in other companies.
But Hinton was not in favor of LLMs anyway, he argued backprop is not what the brain does and that we should do better than these models. I'd say Google would be a great place for someone thinking like that.
