October 11, 2024 | Scientists Receive Nobel Prizes Amid Controversy Over AI Research

Canadian physicist Geoffrey Hinton and three other scientists received Nobel Prizes this week for work related to advances in artificial intelligence.

Their discoveries have the potential to revolutionize mankind’s ability to cure disease.

But these advances in AI come with a warning from one of the recipients.

Geoffrey Hinton, 76-year-old University of Toronto physicist and known as the Godfather of AI received the Nobel Prize in Physics this week, along with John Hopfield, for pioneering work on the foundational principles of machine learning. Hinton worked at a Google division focused on AI until 2023 when he resigned and expressed publicly his concerns about the potential for AI to be used for evil purposes.

I wrote about him and his concerns in June 2023 which you can access here.

Hinton sees AI as an existential risk to humanity. In his remarks after receiving the Nobel he said,

“There’s two kinds of regret. There is the kind where you feel guilty because you do something you know you shouldn’t have done, and then there’s the regret where you do something you would do again in the same circumstances, but it may in the end not turn out well. That second regret I have. In the same circumstances I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this is that systems more intelligent than us eventually take control. We have no experience of what it is like to have things that are smarter than us.”

In 2023 Hinton expressed his concern that AI could be used for military purposes.

On a positive note, the Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded in recognition of discoveries about the shape and structure of proteins. Sir Demis Hassabis, a British scientist, and senior research scientist John Jumper shared one-half of the prize while Professor David Baker received the other half. Hassabis’s startup DeepMind was sold to Google in 2015.

Hassabis and collaborators developed the AlphaFold algorithm for this research. Google opened the algorithm to more than two million academics who use it to explore the nature of 200 million proteins. Here is a YouTube video that explains what AlphaFold technology does.

In 2022 DeepMind released snapshots of nearly every protein in existence. Proteins are the building blocks for humans, animals, plants, bacteria and more.

Baker’s work at the University of Washington involves designing proteins that do not exist in nature. A startup company, Xaira Therapeutics, raised more than $1 billion this year to do R&D for new drugs using Baker’s research. The company’s CEO is Marc Tessier-Lavigne, formerly the president of Stanford and chief scientific officer of Genentech.

While the very impressive achievements of such key players does not guarantee success, the use of AI for drug therapy is considered promising by some very smart people.

Tessier said, “AI is going to transform every step of the drug discovery process.”

This optimistic prediction contrasts sharply with Hinton’s repeated warnings about AI’s potential to do harm.

Hilliard MacBeth

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Hilliard MacBeth October 11th, 2024

Posted In: Hilliard's Weekend Notebook

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