Nobel physics prize winner John Hopfield calls new AI advances ‘unnerving’, cautions against ‘lack of understanding’

John Hopfield, a US scientist who won the 2024 Nobel Physics Prize and is a professor emeritus at Princeton, has called the recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies “very unnerving”, as per an AFP report.

Hopfield, 91, also cautioned against a “lack” of a deeper understanding of advanced technologies and warned of possible catastrophe if not kept in check, it added.

Hopfield and co-winner Geoffrey Hinton (76) both called for a “deeper understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems to prevent them from spiralling out of control”, the report said.

‘Rise of Potential Hazardous Tech’

Speaking via video to an audience at New Jersey University, Hopfield called nuclear physics and biological engineering as the two “powerful but potentially hazardous technologies” that have emerged during his lifetime.

“One is accustomed to having technologies that are not singularly only good or only bad but have capabilities in both directions. And as a physicist, I’m very unnerved by something which has no control, something which I don’t understand well enough so that I can understand what are the limits which one could drive that technology,” he stated.

‘AI is Very, Very Unnerving’

Hopfield stated that AI is also among the tech where limits and understanding of the tech is important to have control.

“That’s the question AI is pushing. Despite modern AI systems appearing to be absolute marvels, there is a lack of understanding about how they function, which is very, very unnerving,” the physicist said.

“That’s why I myself, and I think Geoffrey Hinton also, would strongly advocate understanding as an essential need of the field, which is going to develop some abilities that are beyond the abilities you can imagine at present,” he added.

“You don’t know that the collective properties you began with are actually the collective properties with all the interactions present, and you don’t, therefore, know whether some spontaneous but unwanted thing is lying hidden in the works,” stressed Hopfield.

Hopfield and Hinton won the joint physics Nobel this year for their pioneering work on the foundations of artificial intelligence. The pair’s research on neural networks in the 1980s paved the way for technology that promises to revolutionise society but has also raised apocalyptic fears.

The “Hopfield network”, — a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories. It was the basis for Hinton’s “Boltzmann machine”.

‘Godfather of AI’ Warns Against Tech

Hopfield’s model was improved upon by Hinton, also known as the “Godfather of AI” for his “Boltzmann machine”, which paved the way for modern AI applications such as image generators.

Hinton has been critical of AI and at a recent conference at the University of Toronto, where he is professor emeritus, the British-Canadian cautioned of Ai taking control of humans. Hinton quit his job at Google in 2023 to warn of the “profound risks to society and humanity” of the technology.

“I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton told reporters after the Nobel announcement.

“If you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things, which makes you wonder whether when AI gets smarter than us, it’s going to take over control,” he added.

Hinton said it was impossible to know how to escape catastrophic scenarios at present, “that’s why we urgently need more research.”

“I’m advocating that our best young researchers, or many of them, should work on AI safety, and governments should force the large companies to provide the computational facilities that they need to do that,” he added.