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The award mustn't feed the AI-hype cycle.Illustration by The Atlantic. Supply: Science & Society Image Library / Getty.October 8, 2024, 5:32 PM ET That is Atlantic Intelligence, a e-newsletter during which our writers enable you wrap your thoughts round synthetic intelligence and a brand new machine age. Enroll right here.The checklist of Nobel laureates reads like a group of humanity’s best treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it additionally contains two physicists whose analysis, within the Nineteen Eighties, laid the foundations for contemporary synthetic intelligence.Earlier at the moment, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for utilizing “instruments from physics to develop strategies which can be the inspiration of at the moment’s highly effective machine studying.” Hinton is usually known as a “godfather of AI,” and at the moment’s prize—one that's supposed for these whose work has conferred “the best profit to humankind”—would appear to mark the generative-AI revolution, and tech executives’ grand pronouncements concerning the prosperity that ChatGPT and its brethren are bringing, as a fait accompli.Not so quick. Committee members saying the prize, whereas gesturing to generative AI, didn't point out ChatGPT. As an alternative, their focus was on the grounded methods during which Hopfield and Hinton’s analysis, which enabled the statistical evaluation of huge datasets, has remodeled physics, chemistry, biology, and extra. As I wrote in an article at the moment, the award “shouldn't be taken as a prediction of a science-fictional utopia or dystopia to come back a lot as a recognition of all of the ways in which AI has already modified the world.”AI fashions will proceed to alter the world, however AI’s confirmed purposes shouldn't be confused with Huge Tech’s prophecies. Machines that may “study” from massive datasets are...
The award mustn’t feed the AI-hype cycle.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Supply: Science & Society Image Library / Getty.
That is Atlantic Intelligence, a e-newsletter during which our writers enable you wrap your thoughts round synthetic intelligence and a brand new machine age. Enroll right here.
The checklist of Nobel laureates reads like a group of humanity’s best treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it additionally contains two physicists whose analysis, within the Nineteen Eighties, laid the foundations for contemporary synthetic intelligence.
Earlier at the moment, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for utilizing “instruments from physics to develop strategies which can be the inspiration of at the moment’s highly effective machine studying.” Hinton is usually known as a “godfather of AI,” and at the moment’s prize—one that’s supposed for these whose work has conferred “the best profit to humankind”—would appear to mark the generative-AI revolution, and tech executives’ grand pronouncements concerning the prosperity that ChatGPT and its brethren are bringing, as a fait accompli.
Not so quick. Committee members saying the prize, whereas gesturing to generative AI, didn’t point out ChatGPT. As an alternative, their focus was on the grounded methods during which Hopfield and Hinton’s analysis, which enabled the statistical evaluation of huge datasets, has remodeled physics, chemistry, biology, and extra. As I wrote in an article at the moment, the award “shouldn’t be taken as a prediction of a science-fictional utopia or dystopia to come back a lot as a recognition of all of the ways in which AI has already modified the world.”
AI fashions will proceed to alter the world, however AI’s confirmed purposes shouldn’t be confused with Huge Tech’s prophecies. Machines that may “study” from massive datasets are the stuff of yesterday’s information, and superintelligent machines that exchange people stay the stuff of yesterday’s novels. Let’s not neglect that.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Supply: Science & Society Image Library / Getty.
AI’s Penicillin and X-Ray Second
By Matteo Wong
Right this moment, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton obtained the Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking statistical strategies which have superior physics, chemistry, biology, and extra. Within the announcement, Ellen Moons, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics and a physicist at Karlstad College, celebrated the 2 laureates’ work, which used “elementary ideas from statistical physics to design synthetic neural networks” that may “discover patterns in massive information units.” She talked about purposes of their analysis in astrophysics and medical prognosis, in addition to in day by day applied sciences resembling facial recognition and language translation. She even alluded to the adjustments and challenges that AI could convey sooner or later. However she didn’t point out ChatGPT, widespread automation and the ensuing international financial upheaval or prosperity, or the opportunity of eliminating all illness with AI, as tech executives are wont to do.
Right this moment’s Nobel Prize announcement centered largely on the usage of AI for scientific analysis. In an article final 12 months, I reported on how machine studying is making science quicker and fewer human, in flip “difficult the very nature of discovery.”
Whether or not the long run can be awash with superintelligent chatbots, nevertheless, is much from sure. In July, my colleague Charlie Warzel spoke with Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington about an AI-based health-care enterprise they not too long ago launched, and got here away with the impression that AI is turning into an “trade powered by blind religion.”
P.S.
A pair weeks in the past, I had the pleasure of talking with Terence Tao, maybe the world’s best residing mathematician, about his perceptions of at the moment’s generative AI and his imaginative and prescient for a completely new, “industrial-scale” arithmetic that AI might at some point allow. I discovered our dialog fascinating, and hope you’ll as nicely.
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