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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

nobelprize.org

221–230 of 876 posts

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#221
post #205

[flagged]

I don't think there is a take I can disagree with more strongly. New technology can always be used for good or bad. His work in ML sets the course for a better future in spite of the people who use it for ill, whether advertisers or warlords.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#222
post #205

[flagged]

> His work is a net negative for the world.

Bit early for this very Hacker News type blurt.

Eg: Personalized medicine, predictive medicine, protein folding, climate modelling, smart grids, fraud detection, disaster response, food production modelling, etc.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#223
post #210

Well maybe in time ML will help break through the high energy physics roadblocks.

One of the very early successful applications of ML was using neural network and other models in particle identification systems in particle physics experiments.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#226
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics of this topic have always been interesting to me, especially when compared to various other fields. What is there to incentivize people to enter STEM fields, and especially research? As a point of comparison, there are ~540 premier league football players, with an average salary of 3.5 million pounds. (Yes, that's average, not median, but there's less than 20 of them that earn under 200k.) It's not _tha…

If Physicists could split atoms with only their arms and legs with some safety equipment, I bet they would get paid even more than 3.5 million pound salary.

Splitting atoms? Nah, that's the easy one, you can do that yourself even if you're quadriplegic and in a coma.

Even fusion is high school science fair stuff.

Spallation, antiprotons, quark gluon plasmas? Now you're talking.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Altough of course you're right, let's play devil's advocate an imagine a world without Nobel prices. Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee) we don't get to have that. If people gets to ignore (more) such topics, it's likely politicians, and universities react accordingly, and funnel funds to other enterprises. All these prices (I'd say…

The economics of this topic have always been interesting to me, especially when compared to various other fields. What is there to incentivize people to enter STEM fields, and especially research? As a point of comparison, there are ~540 premier league football players, with an average salary of 3.5 million pounds. (Yes, that's average, not median, but there's less than 20 of them that earn under 200k.) It's not _tha…

Weirdly, if you sniff the XHR from [0] (when it loads a new page), it claims there's 1171 players for 24/25. Except if you look at a few of the teams individually, they're between 30-35 players. Which is much more in line with your ~540 than their 1171.

> the remuneration is insanely disproportionate

I once pointed out that Kevin De Bruyne, on his own, gets paid almost half as much (~21M) as the entire salary cap of the Rugby Union Premiership (~2022, 50M) (to make the point there's much more money in football than rugby.)

[0] https://www.premierleague.com/players

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#229
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you saying that's part of his reason to leave Google?

That's my suspicion, yes.

The age too, and the fact that Google lost prestige in AI over the years.

It's the company that didn't see the potential of Transformers, and that presented a half-assed Bard when LLMs were already in production in other companies.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#230
post #210

Well maybe in time ML will help break through the high energy physics roadblocks.

it already had, bottom-quark tagging has improved O(10)x in efficiency in the last decade without any new "physics" understanding, just from training with more low-level data and better ML arch (now using Transformers)

but we haven't found new physics with or without ML, making this prize a little weird.

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