Nobel Prize winners are often deeply appreciative of their students for having aided their research and contributed to their academic successes, but Geoffrey Hinton, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, has a different reason for being proud of one of his students.
Geoffrey Hinton, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on neural networks that has led to the creation of products like ChatGPT, has said that he’s proud that one of his students fired Sam Altman, creator of ChatGPT. “I’d also like to acknowledge my students. I was particularly fortunate to have many very clever students, much cleverer than me, who actually made things work. They’ve gone on to do great things. I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman,” Hinton said after it had been announced that he’d received the Nobel Prize.
“OpenAI was set up with a big emphasis on safety,” Hinton said. “Its primary objective was to develop artificial general intelligence and ensure that it was safe. One of my former students, Ilya Sutskever, was the chief scientist, and over time it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that’s unfortunate,” he added.
Hinton appeared to be referring to the dramatic OpenAI coup, in which OpenAI’s CEO and President were fired by the board. But there had been a massive employee protest at their firings, and after some further drama in which they briefly joined Microsoft, the duo were reinstated at OpenAI. This made things very awkward for OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, who had been instrumental in their removal, and he left the company not long after and started his own startup.
Ilya Sutskever had studied under Geoffrey Hinton during his time at the University of Toronto. He began his academic journey there, completing his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 2005, followed by a Master of Science in Computer Science in 2007, and ultimately earning his Ph.D. in 2013, with Hinton serving as his doctoral advisor.
Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize this year for his pioneering contributions to artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the realm of neural networks. He obtained his BA in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and earned a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. Hinton has been instrumental in advancing deep learning techniques, and his work on the backpropagation algorithm and innovations like Boltzmann machines and deep belief networks have revolutionized fields such as speech recognition and image classification. In addition to his academic roles, Hinton has been involved with industry, notably as a Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google from 2013 until 2023. He was awarded the Turing Award (2018) for his contributions to deep learning, and has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024 for foundational discoveries in machine learning.
But despite his successes, and of the AI techniques he’s pioneered, Hinton has recently expressed concerns about the risks associated with AI technology, highlighting a shift in his perspective on its implications for society. He has been vocal about the need for AI safety, and said that unconstrained progress in AI could present an existential risk to humanity. And with Hinton openly talking about how he was proud that Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, it appears that he’ll continue to highlight the dangers of AI even after winning the Nobel Prize for aiding in its creation.