Between You and AI

1Understanding Artificial Intelligence

IN THE EARLY hours of 8 October 2024, a man lay sleeping in a cheap California motel room. He had taken the next day off from his job as an AI researcher and university professor to undergo an MRI at a nearby hospital.

At about 2:00 a.m., his phone rang, abruptly pulling him from a deep sleep. Half-conscious, he instinctively reached for his phone and answered in a groggy voice. On the other end of the line, a calm but firm voice spoke after confirming his identity: “Dr. Hinton, we are calling to inform you that you have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.”

For a brief moment, he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming.

Perhaps it was some cruel prank or a misdialed number. Nobel Prizes aren’t exactly announced in the middle of the night, and, at that moment, he certainly didn’t feel like someone who had just joined the ranks of history’s most celebrated scientists. After all, his research was in AI, not in physics. Still half asleep, he squinted at his phone’s screen and noticed the caller ID indicated a Swedish number. He thought, “Wait a minute… . The Nobel Prize committee is based in Sweden. Could this actually be real?” The unmistakable Swedish accent of the caller was a detail that lent credibility to the surreal moment, but he hesitated further. He knew well that AI-generated voices could mimic foreign accents, as AI was precisely the kind of technology he had spent his entire career researching and developing. But as he listened ...