As we know, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopefield have been awarded the Nobel in Physics for their work in machine learning. Hinton earned reputation for his contribution to AI and his adoption of backpropagation to improve the model. Critics here point out that Paul Werbos and Shun-Ichi Amari have done pathbreaking work several decades earlier to pave the way for modern neural networks. Werbos 1974 PhD thesis and Amari’s 1972 adaptive learning model constitute the seminal work, but have been overlooked by the work of Hinton.
Critics feel that the Nobel Committee should take notice of the full spectrum of contributions. Major breakthroughs may not occur in isolation. It is an issue of credit allocation. The narrative focuses on the recipients of Nobel at the cost of early pioneers who fade away from the view.
However, this issue is not unique to AI. History is full of such examples. iPhone has been derived by incremental features to the already existing smartphones. Macintosh was developed on the basis innovations at Xerox. At times, those who refine the technology making them accessible get more credit. Innovations are improvements over existing ideas and may not be altogether novel. Musk too made EVs desirable and scalable, though EVs existed for more than a century. Tesla refined and executed the product well.
This dynamic is in vogue in Silicon Valley. Facebook was not the first to put forward social networking. There were MySpace and Friendster. Google was not the first search engine. AltaVista has existed long before. Both Facebook and Google made a refined and desirable product that was scaled to new heights. Silicon Valley is good at improving and expanding existing technologies.
AI treads on the same beaten track. Hinton’s work is important, but it is based on earlier work. AI technologies do not emerge out of thin air. Everything is incremental. It is a collaborative process.
The truth is that being a pioneer of innovation is not as important as the development of it by refining, scaling and execution. Innovation is not the result of a single genius but is a collective work. True innovation is a journey where the start is not the focus, but the whole journey matters. Of course, credit must be given to the pioneers.
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