Canadian AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton ‘flabbergasted’ after winning Nobel Prize

Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist whose machine learning discoveries have proved so profound he’s known as the ‘godfather of AI,’ has won the Nobel Prize in physics.

The honour was bestowed Tuesday on Hinton, 76, and Princeton University researcher John Hopfield, 91, by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It chose to award the pair because their use of physics had uncovered patterns in information that laid the foundation for machine learning and neural networks.

Machine learning is a form of computer science that relies on data and algorithms to help artificial intelligence mimic how humans learn, while neural networks are models that emulate the human brain by learning from data and detecting patterns. Both technologies underpin artificial intelligence, which provides the framework for devices and systems used across every industry around the world.

During a Stockholm news conference to announce the award, Hinton said he was “flabbergasted” when the academy reached him by phone to announce his prize.

“I had no idea this would happen. I am very surprised,” he said.

He later told an interviewer from the Nobel Prize that he had learned of his win around 2 a.m., while at a “cheap” hotel in California, where he was due to receive an MRI on Tuesday.

“I guess I’ll have to cancel that,” he joked.

When the call came in from Stockholm, Hinton doubted it was even real.

“My very first thought was how could I be sure it wasn’t a spoof call?” he said.

He was convinced of its authenticity when he realized it was coming from Sweden: “The person had a strong Swedish accent and there were several of them.”

His win will hand him half the share of the 11 million Swedish kronor (about C$1.45 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, but it will also further cement Hinton’s status as an AI pioneer.

While the technology has deeply fascinated the computer scientist for decades, he’s more recently developed concerns about AI because it has become even more advanced and accessible than he once imagined.

Since the November 2022 release of AI chatbot ChatGPT, everyone from students looking to cut corners on homework to tech giants wanting to boost profits have been racing to innovate with machine learning. Regulators have thus been left to figure out how to curtail some of the technology’s risks.

Despite AI’s recent explosion on the tech scene, Hinton has been researching the technology since the 1980s.

When co-laureate Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images in data, Hinton uncovered a way to find properties in data and identify specific elements in pictures, said the University of Toronto, where Hinton is a professor emeritus, Tuesday.

Hinton and his graduate students later built on the Boltzmann machine, which can classify images and generate new examples of patterns it was trained on, ushering in a modern take on machine leaning.

Their work has ultimately “become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said.

Much of Hinton’s work was completed at U of T’s computer science department, where he became a professor in 1987. He left about a decade later to found a computational neuroscience unit at University College London but returned in 2001.

In 2012, his team at the University of Toronto won the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition by developing a technique that could identify images far better than competitors.

A year later, Google acquired DNNresearch, Hinton’s neural networks startup based on his U of T research.

In 2018, an even bigger honour came his way in the form of the A.M. Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, which he won with fellow Canadian Yoshua Bengio and American Yan LeCun.

After learning of the Nobel announcement, Bengio said he emailed his congratulations to Hinton, who he said responded “warmly.”

Bengio was a grad student when Hopfield and Hinton made several of their breakthroughs in the eighties.

“It changed really the meaning of AI for me and it made me really excited about working on neural networks because it not only brought concepts from physics into AI, which is really cool, but it also brought a broader, maybe more important idea,” Bengio recalled.

“In the same way that in physics, we are able to explain what is going on with a few simple mathematical equations, we could do the same to understand intelligence … and that was not at all a common view.”

The pair later met when Bengio became a professor. Hinton exceeded his expectations.

“He’s the kind of person who has a new idea a day,” Bengio said. “Very creative, very insightful, but also a real scholar (because) he’s interested in everything.”

Lately, much of Hinton’s interest lies in worries about the technology that has been his life’s work. He quit his role as vice-president and engineering fellow at Google last spring so he could speak more freely about the risks of AI.

The move made Hinton a hot commodity on the tech conference circuit, where he has told audiences in Toronto that he fears AI could trigger lethal autonomous weapons, discrimination, unemployment, misinformation and even the demise of humanity.

Despite urging the world to act quickly to prevent the worst scenarios it could cause, he hasn’t eschewed AI completely.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement, referring to the chatbot’s latest model.

“I don’t totally trust it, because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything, it’s a not very good expert.”

Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, was one of the students Hinton won the ImageNet prize with.

Other proteges including Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst have gone on to found Cohere, one of the country’s buzziest AI startups. Gomez called Hinton “a real hero for our field and for Canada” and Frosst said “his passion for discovery and invention will always be an inspiration but his kindness, playfulness and mentorship have benefitted me most.”

Hinton’s influence on burgeoning tech talent has largely come from his close ties to U of T but also his work as a chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute in Toronto and his investment in Radical Ventures, a Toronto-based venture capital fund focused on AI.

In congratulating Hinton, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland called him “the teacher of generations of great Canadian intellectual leaders,” while U of T president Meric Gertler said the school was “immensely proud of his historic accomplishment.”

Tony Gaffney, Vector’s president and CEO, said Hinton’s “pioneering research at the University of Toronto not only revolutionized the field of AI but has also been instrumental in establishing Canada as a global powerhouse in AI research and innovation.”

— With files from Craig Wong and Dylan Robertson in Ottawa and Jordan Omstead in Toronto

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.

RICHMOND, B.C. – Canadian border officers in British Columbia made 60 seizures of methamphetamine destined for export to Australia between March and August.

The Canadian Border Services Agency says the seizures totalled nearly 400 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine and close to 1,300 litres of a liquid form of the drug.

The agency says the liquid was seized in June in a single-day operation at the Fraser Surrey Dock, southeast of Vancouver.

The crystal meth was found in separate seizures at the Tsawwassen container examination facility, the international mail centre and international cargo operations, and at passenger operations facilities at Vancouver International Airport.

The border services agency says a total of 85 kilograms of methamphetamine was seized at the mail centre in 54 separate incidents between April and August.

It says the investigation has been handed over to the RCMP in B.C. who will be working with the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Border Force.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.

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TORONTO – More than 600 professional engineers and land surveyors who work for the Ontario government have started a work-to-rule campaign and warn that their job action could affect the province’s ability to make progress on key infrastructure projects.

Their bargaining association says members’ earnings have fallen so far behind that they sometimes earn half of what people in similar positions at municipalities make. They have been without a contract for 20 months.

Nihar Bhatt, president of Professional Engineers Government of Ontario, said his members want to see a “significant” increase in pay, though he did not give specific percentages.

“What we’re looking for is market alignment,” he said.

“We are behind the market by 30 to 50 per cent. Obviously, nobody’s logically going to think that that’s what we’re going to get, but we need to start moving in that direction.”

A spokesperson for Treasury Board President Caroline Mulroney said the government stands ready to negotiate in good faith at the next scheduled mediation later this month.

“Since July 2023, the government has held numerous bargaining sessions with the Professional Engineers Government of Ontario bargaining team in an effort to reach a fair deal at the negotiating table,” Liz Tuomi wrote.

“The government’s latest offer recognizes the specialized role of PEGO employees.”

Tuomi did not provide details about the government’s offer.

The engineers and land surveyors are employed by several government ministries and agencies and do work related to the provincial highway network, the Ontario Building Code, land surveying, fire safety, food and workplace safety, clean air and safe drinking water.

Low wages are creating a recruitment and retention crisis that could lead to delays on government priorities such as Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass, Bhatt said.

“Fifty per cent of our membership has less than five years of experience,” he said.

“You can’t have like half the membership sitting here with almost no experience and being thrust into all these duties, because the senior people have gone to the lower levels of government, ironically. So the issue is recruitment and retention, and that flows from a fundamental structural misalignment with the market.”

PEGO and the Treasury Board have an agreement in place as to the maintenance of essential and emergency services during a legal strike, the association said.

But they are now engaging in a work-to-rule campaign, which includes not doing unpaid overtime or working outside of their set hours, not doing work that is supposed to be done by managers within the public service and not doing work for more than one position.

Subsequent escalation could include strategic withdrawals of labour by certain groups of employees that could affect the ability to advance and manage critical infrastructure, the association says.

“We don’t want to do this, but next month, when major milestones are coming up for the Bradford Bypass, and they decide not to review the design requirements, what happens then?” Bhatt said.

“We are not a profession prone to threats. We don’t want to do this. We like to build stuff, and we like to do it right, and we like to do it safely, but we can’t be doing it in the way they’re doing it.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.