Geoffrey Hinton almost didn’t believe he’d won the Nobel Prize.
When the committee called in 2024, the 77-year-old computer scientist ran a quick calculation in his head. What are the odds, he asked himself, that a theoretical psychologist hiding in computer science gets the Nobel Prize in physics? “Well, maybe one in two million,” he told the crowd at the Sana AI Summit in New York last week. Then again: what are the odds you dream about winning it? “Maybe one in two million … So that means it’s a million times more likely it’s a dream than reality.”
