Two AI Pioneers Win Turing Award for Key Technique Used in ChatGPT

Two professors who pioneered a key technique that became central to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems like ChatGPT have won the Turing Award, which is considered the Nobel Prize of computing.

Andrew Barto, professor emeritus of information and computer sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Richard Sutton, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta in Canada, developed the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning.

The two will split the $1 million award, which was named after Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician widely known as one of the fathers of computer science and AI.

Reinforcement learning enables AI systems to learn through trial and error. This approach has been used in breakthrough applications such as AlphaGo’s victory over Lee Sedol, the world champion in the game Go, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which uses reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

Barto and Sutton’s 1998 textbook, “Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction,” is the field’s standard reference with over 75,000 citations.

Their collaboration began in 1978 at UMass Amherst when Barto was Sutton’s Ph.D and postdoctoral adviser. They developed many of the basic algorithmic approaches for reinforcement learning. Their key contributions include temporal difference learning, policy-gradient methods, and use of neural networks to represent learned functions.

The duo’s multidisciplinary approach helped lead to their breakthroughs.

“Research areas ranging from cognitive science and psychology to neuroscience inspired the development of reinforcement learning,” said President Yannis Ioannidis of the Association for Computing Machinery, which gives out the Turing Award, in a Wednesday (March 5) blog post.

In a 1947 lecture, Turing had said, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience,” according to Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist. “Reinforcement learning, as pioneered by Barto and Sutton, directly answers that challenge,” he said. “Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in AI over the last several decades.”

The Turing Award is financially supported by Google.

While the Turing Award is considered computing’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize, there were only two people who have won both.

Last year, Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work in the development of neural networks. The only other person to win both awards was Herbert Simon, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in economic sciences.