British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton and American John Hopfield won the Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for their pioneering work on the foundations of artificial intelligence, with both sounding the alarm over the technology they helped bring to life.

The pair's research on neural networks in the 1980s paved the way for today's deep-learning systems that promise to revolutionise society but have also raised apocalyptic fears.

"In the same circumstances, I would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control," Hinton, 76, told reporters after the announcement.

Hinton, known as "the Godfather of AI", raised eyebrows in 2023 when he quit his job at Google to warn of the "profound risks to society and humanity" of the technology.

In March last year, when asked whether AI could wipe out humanity, Hinton replied: "It's not inconceivable."

The pair were honoured "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks", the jury said.

Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told a press conference that these tools have become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.

While lauding the potential of AI, Moons noted "its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future collectively".

"Humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way," she said.

Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton, was spotlighted for having created the "Hopfield network", also known as associative memory, which can be used to "store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data".

The physicist joined Hinton in calling for a deeper understanding of modern AI systems to prevent them spiralling out of control, calling recent advances in the technology "very unnerving".

"You don't know that the collective properties you began with are actually the collective properties with all the interactions present, and you don't therefore know whether some spontaneous, but unwanted thing, is lying hidden in the works," the physicist told a gathering at his university via video link.

The jury said Hinton, a 76-year-old professor at the University of Toronto, used the Hopfield network as a foundation for a new network: "the Boltzmann machine".

Hinton was credited with inventing "a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures".

"I'm flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen," Hinton told reporters in a phone interview as the laureates were announced in Stockholm.

Hinton said he was an avid user of AI tools such as ChatGPT, and said he believed the technology will have "a huge influence".

"It will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability," Hinton said. (AFP)