Matt O’brien, The Associated PressComputer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who studies neural networks used in artificial intelligence applications, poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015.
That was Tuesday. Then, early Wednesday, two employees of Google's AI division won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for using AI to predict and design novel proteins. Neural network advances came from “basic, curiosity-driven research,” Hinton said at a press conference after his win. “Not out of throwing money at applied problems, but actually letting scientists follow their curiosity to try and understand things.”
The chemistry Nobel Prize awarded Wednesday went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google’s London-based DeepMind laboratory along with researcher David Baker at the University of Washington for work that could help discover new medicines. Hinton, 76, said he was staying in a cheap hotel in Palo Alto, California when the Nobel committee woke him up with a phone call early Tuesday morning, leading him to cancel a medical appointment scheduled for later that day.
Guests included Google executives and another former Hinton student, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist and board member at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Sutskever helped lead a group of board members who briefly ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year in turmoil that has symbolized the industry's conflicts.