Geoffrey Hinton Has Used His Nobel Prize Winnings to Create a New Award for A.I.

Geoffrey Hinton, the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, is donating some of his newfound award winnings to establish a separate prize benefitting young machine learning researchers. Hinton and his co-winner John Hopfield received the prize in October for their contributions to the field of A.I.—an honor that was accompanied by 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million) in prize money for the two winners to share.

A portion of Hinton’s $500,000 will fund the newly created Sejnowski-Hinton Prize, an annual prize of $10,000 that will be given out at the machine learning-focused Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). The award, announced earlier this week at NeurIPS 2024, will recognize collaborations involving two or more researchers under the age 40 who propose a novel theory of how the human brain works.

Often hailed as the “Godfather of A.I.,” Hinton himself is celebrated for his work on artificial neural networks, which take inspiration from the structure of human brains and laid the groundwork for today’s A.I. revolution. His Nobel Prize win specified his development of the Boltzmann machine, a type of neural network using statistical probabilities. It was built off his co-laureate’s Hopfield machine, a neural network model able to store information in data.

The newly created Sejnowski-Hinton Prize, meanwhile, takes its name from both Hinton and Terry Sejnowski, a prominent researcher in computational neuroscience who worked with Hinton on the Boltzmann machine and completed his Ph.D. research under Hopfield.

Where is the rest of the prize money going?

The remainder of Hinton’s Nobel Prize winnings are earmarked for charity. Half of his prize money will benefit Water First, a Canadian nonprofit working to solve challenges around drinking water in indigenous communities. The A.I. pioneer said he also intends to donate some of the funds to a charity that aids neurodiverse young adults in finding employment.

Currently a professor emeritus at Canada’s University of Toronto, Hinton previously worked at Google (GOOGL) before stepping away from the tech company last year. He has since become a prominent advocate for enhanced safety regulations around A.I.’s immediate and existential threats. Upon winning the Nobel Prize earlier this year, the academic said he expected the honor to “make me more credible” when warning about the technology’s risks.

Besides giving away his Nobel Prize money, Hinton is also donating an early Boltzmann chip to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. As part of the annual awards, it is a tradition for Nobel Laureates to provide the museum with a personal item that is important to them. Other objects donated by this year’s winners included a paper origami crown from John Jumper, the director of Google DeepMind and one of the recipients of the chemistry award alongside the lab’s CEO Demis Hassabis. The paper crown was used by his team to encourage each other as they developed the AlphaFold A.I. program that secured their Nobel Prize.