🧙🏼 AI pioneers awarded Nobel prizes

Howdy, wizards.

Let’s dive into some groundbreaking AI today.

DARIO’S PICKS

1. AI pioneers receive the Nobel prize in Physics and Chemistry

AI is making waves far beyond drafting emails and generating videos of owls hosting TED talks. And some of that impactful work is now receiving recognition from the Nobel committee.

• In Physics – the two scientists, John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton, received the Nobel prize this week for their discoveries that have shaped the course of machine learning with artificial neural networks.

  • Hopfield, a 91-year-old professor at Princeton, developed the Hopfield network in 1982, which uses associative memory in neural networks to store and reconstruct information.

  • Hinton, anointed “godfather of AI” in the research community, co-invented the Boltzmann machine in the mid-80s; it’s a type of neural network that learns patterns from data by adjusting connections between its parts. He continued to advance deep learning throughout the 2000s, notably with work on pretraining neural networks in 2006.

  • There’s another side to the story of Hinton as well: Since leaving his job at Google in 2023, he has been warning the world about the dangers of AI, and thinks that the p(DOOM)—that’s slang for the probability of catastrophic outcomes (or “doom”) as a result of artificial intelligence—is above 50%.

• In Chemistry – Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker were awarded the Nobel prize.

  • Baker received the prize for his work on designing novel proteins, from 2003.

  • Hassabis and Jumper got the prize for AlphaFold 2, an AI-model released in 2020 that’s able to predict the structure of all proteins that researchers have identified. It has a ton of scientific applications, ranging from understanding antibiotic resistance to playing a part in decomposing plastic.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ With the recent Nobel prizes, AI is receiving a wider recognition outside of the AI community. It’s possible that, with AI’s rapidly growing influence in so many areas of society, we might soon see AI-related work acknowledged in even more Nobel categories. Also, feels like a sign of the times to have Nobel prize winners shaping something so tremendously impactful, yet being flat out terrified of its consequences.

TOGETHER WITH TELLO

 DARIO’S PICKS

2. Stripe data shows AI startups make money faster than past high-growth startups

Financial Times have used Stripe data to show how top AI startups have far more momentum in terms of revenue than non-AI startups from past eras. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and Midjourney have gotten to millions of dollars faster than a traditional start-ups lifecycle.

The top 100 AI companies using Stripe were compared to a comparable cohort of companies from 2018. AI startups that have scaled to $30 million in annualized revenue did that in 20 months – 5 times faster than the cohort.

The findings come at a time when investors are raising questions on the likely return on gen AI investments, with illustrating narratives like Sequioa’s AI’s $600B Question.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Despite being a high-profile piece, this article lacks important context imho:

• The data shows that AI companies growing to $30M+ in revenue are doing so at record speeds, but the comparison might not be entirely fair. It contrasts AI’s early-stage companies with SaaS startups from a much more mature market—so is it really apples to apples?

• Also, no mention of profitability, despite the huge compute costs we know these companies face.

• On a broader level, there’s also the argument that AI companies aren’t really that concerned about making money right now – that new products are merely “pitch decks” to continue raising capital to build AGI.

Food for thought.

RECOMMENDED

Love Hacker News but don’t have the time to read it every day?

Try TLDR’s free daily newsletter 

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

Affiliate disclosure: To cover the cost of my email software and the time I spend writing this newsletter, I sometimes link to products and other newsletters. Please assume these are affiliate links. If you choose to subscribe to a newsletter or buy a product through any of my links then THANK YOU – it will make it possible for me to continue to do this.