The Download: Geoffrey Hinton’s Nobel Prize, and multimodal AI
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Hinton shares the award with fellow computer scientist John Hopfield, who invented a type of pattern-matching neural network that could store and reconstruct data. Hinton built on this technology, known as Hopfield networks, to develop back propagation, an algorithm that lets neural networks learn.
But since May 2023, when MIT Technology Review helped break the news that Hinton was now scared of the technology that he had helped bring about, the 76-year-old scientist has become much better known as a figurehead for doomerism—the mindset that takes a very real risk that near-future AI could produce catastrophic results, up to and including human extinction. Read the full story.
—Will Douglas Heaven
Forget chat. AI that can hear, see and click is already here
Chatting with an AI chatbot is so 2022. The latest hot AI toys take advantage of multimodal models, which can handle several things at the same time, such as images, audio, and text.
Multimodal generative content has also become markedly better in a very short time, and the way we interact with AI systems is also changing, becoming less reliant on text. What unites these features is a more interactive, customizable interface and the ability to apply AI tools to lots of different types of source material. But we’ve yet to see a killer app. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
