Both of the men who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics are artificial intelligence pioneers — and one of them is considered the technology’s “godfather.” As Reuters reports, American physicist John Hopfield and AI expert Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the coveted prize this week. Considered the “godfather of AI,” Hinton’s research in 2012 laid the groundwork for today’s neural networks — but in 2023, he quit his job at Google to join a chorus of critics sounding alarm bells about the technology. In an interview with the New York Times last year about leaving his job as a vice president and engineering fellow at the tech giant, Hinton said he’d previously thought of Google as a “proper steward” of the powerful technology. That’s until Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to unleash the latter’s GPT-4 large language model (LLM), which powers ChatGPT, onto the masses. Though he didn’t believe that AI was anywhere near its zenith at the time, the 76-year-old computer scientist suggested he saw the writing on the wall with the Microsoft-OpenAI deal. “Most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off,” Hinton told the newspaper at the time. “I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away.” “Obviously,” he continued, “I no longer think that.” Prior to leaving Google and joining the likes of Elon Musk and other luminaries in signing an open letter calling for a pause on AI development, Hinton took to CBS News to warn that the world had…Researcher Who Just Won the Nobel Prize Quit Google to Warn About Evil AI Coming for Us All