First, Hopfield and Hinton, two of the precursors of neural nets, the data-compressing algorithm that underpins developments like ChatGPT, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and, yesterday, three other computer scientists/neuroscientists/chemists, two of which work at Google Deepmind (the CEO, Demis, and John, director), were awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize, for their contributions to protein folding prediction. As for the Physics prize, the consensus is that both Hopfield and Hinton have been instrumental to the success of Deep Learning, the AI field that comprises neural networks and explains much of the progress of the field over the last two decades. However, their election has been met with mixed feelings, especially from the very own AI field. Especially harsh was Jurgen Schmidhuber, one of the most prominent AI researchers, who directly accused the Academy of 'rewarding plagiarism' as, according to him, both rewardees failed to cite crucial developments by other...
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