UK - A British scientist known as the “Godfather of AI” has won the Nobel Prize for physics – but has regrets about his invention. Professor Geoffrey Hinton, who was born in London and studied at the University of Cambridge, shared the honour with Professor John Hopfield of Princeton University. The 76-year-old was staying in a “cheap hotel in California” when he received the early morning phone call informing him of his award, while Chicago-born Professor Hopfield, 91, was in a thatched cottage in England. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognised their work using “fundamental concepts” to design artificial neural networks. The work, carried out in the 1980s, which involved inventing a method that can autonomously find properties in data and identify specific elements in pictures, was foundational to the modern AI increasingly dominating the world today.