What is innovation? Lessons from AI’s Nobel controversy

Vivek Wadhwa writes: The myth of the lone genius dominates public narratives, leading us to believe that major breakthroughs occur in isolation

The recent Nobel Prize awarded to Geoffrey Hinton for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked controversy, exposing a deeper issue in how society rewards innovation. While Hinton is celebrated for his pioneering work in AI and popularising backpropagation, critics, including AI expert Jürgen Schmidhuber, argue that the prize overlooks the foundational contributions of Paul Werbos and Shun-Ichi Amari — two figures whose groundbreaking work decades earlier laid the groundwork for modern neural networks. Werbos’s 1974 PhD thesis and Amari’s 1972 adaptive learning model were crucial stepping-stones, yet their efforts have largely been overshadowed by the visibility of later figures such as Hinton.

While Geoffrey Hinton’s recognition is deserved, it underscores a common flaw in how credit is distributed: the contributions of early pioneers often fade from view. (AFP)