Head-scratchers by Bengals and Bills coaches in waning seconds highlight NFL's topsy-turvy Week 5

If only Zac Taylor and Sean McDermott could have swapped end-of-game strategies, the teetering Cincinnati Bengals and Buffalo Bills might have avoided their big bellyflops in the NFL's topsy-turvy Week 5.

Taylor called three straight runs that ultimately doomed Cincy (1-4 ) and McDermott dialed up three straight passes that basically did in Buffalo (3-2).

Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson put on an electric quarterback duel in Cincinnati, combining for 740 yards passing and nine touchdown throws.

The Ravens were driving for a potential winning touchdown in overtime when Jackson fumbled the snap and Cincinnati's Germaine Pratt recovered all the way back at the Ravens' 38.

That was already safely in kicker Evan McPherson's range. He'd nailed his last three field goal attempts from 50 or more yards and had made his last 14 tries in the fourth quarter or overtime.

So, Taylor played it safe and had Joe Burrow hand off three times to Chase Brown rather than have Burrow keep throwing. He'd already thrown for 392 yards and a career-high five touchdowns, including two each to Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins.

Chase led the Bengals with 10 catches for 193 yards, and Higgins had nine grabs for 83 yards and both faced single coverage on the Bengals' final series.

Even though 50-yarders have become routine in the NFL, a lot can go wrong on a long field-goal attempt, and after the Bengals ran three times into Baltimore's wall of defenders for 3 yards, McPherson, known as “Money Mac” for his accuracy, lined up for a 53-yard try that sailed wide left after holder Ryan Rehkow mishandled the snap.

Baltimore took over on its own 43. On the next play, Derrick Henry, who had been bottled up all afternoon with just 41 yards on 14 carries, rumbled 51 yards down to the Bengals 6 and Justin Tucker chipped in the 24-yarder for the 41-38 win.

Burrow defended Taylor's conservative approach.

“I’m not going to second-guess that,” Burrow said. “We’re in field-goal range. Yes, you want to get yards to make it easier on him. As good as their rush is, you always take a chance at getting sacked in that situation.”

Which, coincidentally, is one reason Bills fans were miffed when McDermott called for three passes when they got the ball at their own 3 with 32 seconds left rather than handing off three times and draining the Texans of their three timeouts.

Unlike Burrow, Josh Allen was having an awful day — he completed just 9 of 30 passes for 131 yards and misfired on his final eight throws.

As the broadcast crew noted, the Bills were risking a safety for a hold by throwing out of their end zone three times and again on fourth down when Sam Martin booted a 56-yard punt just inches from the back of the end zone.

It was returned 13 yards to the Bills' 46, and Houston had seven seconds and all of their timeouts left. While Allen and the Bills prepared for overtime on the sideline, C.J. Stroud hit a quick 5-yard pass to running back Dare Ogunbowale and called timeout with 2 seconds remaining.

Ka’imi Fairbairn trotted out and nailed the 59-yarder as time expired for a 23-20 win.

McDermott readily accepted the blame afterward by noting the Bills should have at least attempted a run on first down — “And that’s on me,” he said.

Unless they bounce back in a big way, both the Bills and Bengals may find themselves looking back and lamenting their lost opportunities and their coach's conservative calls that backfired so spectacularly.

AP NFL coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL

Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow speaks to reporters following an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Cincinnati. The Ravens won 41-38 in overtime. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)

Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen (17) walks off the field after an NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Houston. The Texans won 23-20. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Houston Texans place kicker Ka'imi Fairbairn runs off the field after kicking a 59-yard field goal on the last play of an NFL football game against the Buffalo Bills, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Houston. The Texans won 23-20. (AP Photo/Eric Christian Smith)

Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott speaks during a news conference after an NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Houston. The Texans won 23-20. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor looks on during the first half of an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)

Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker, left, reacts with holder Jordan Stout after booting the game-winning field goal in overtime of an NFL football game, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Cincinnati. The Ravens won 41-38 in overtime. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott walks on the field before an NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Houston. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor, center, reacts while talking to official Mark Perlman (9) during the second half of an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.

Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. “They ... did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

The artificial neural networks they pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation," said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.

“But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

The Nobel committee that honored the science behind machine learning and AI also mentioned fears about its possible flipside. Moons said that while it has "enormous benefits, 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 for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

“I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton said.

On Tuesday, he said he was shocked at the honor.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone. He said he was at a cheap hotel with no internet.

There was no immediate reaction from Hopfield.

Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn" by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns from a teacher with an initial solution graded and flaws identified and returned to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.

His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told The Associated Press in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on. My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly.”

And Hinton himself uses machine learning in his daily life.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it's a not very good expert. And that’s very useful.”

“Twenty years ago, I think people would have happily agreed that systems with the ability of GPT-4 or (Google’s) Gemini had achieved general intelligence comparable to that of humans,” Hinton told the AP this spring. “Being able to answer more or less any question in a sensible way would have passed the test. But now that AI can do that, people want to change the test.”

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

“What fascinates me most is still this question of how mind comes from machine,” Hopfield said in a video posted online by The Franklin Institute after it awarded him a physics prize in 2019.

Hinton used Hopfield's network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognise characteristic elements in a given type of data.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands and Borenstein reported from Washington. Associated Press reporter Matt O'Brien contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, seen in picture, are awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced at a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

Professor Anders Irbäck explains the work of John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton after being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics at a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

This photo combo shows the 2024 Nobel Prize winners in Physics, professor John Hopfield, left, of Princeton University, and professor Geoffrey Hinton, of the University of Toronto, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (Princeton University via AP and Noah Berger/AP Photo)

FILE - Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton poses backstage at the Collision Conference in Toronto, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who studies neural networks used in artificial intelligence applications, poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

FILE - Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who studies neural networks used in artificial intelligence applications, poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

File - Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton poses at Google's Mountain View, Calif, headquarters on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

FILE - Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton speaks at the Collision Conference in Toronto, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, seen in picture, are awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, which is announced at a press conference by Hans Ellergren, center, permanent secretary at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden Tuesday Oct. 8, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)

FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

FILE - A Nobel Prize medal is displayed before a ceremony at the Swedish Ambassador's Residence in London, Monday, Dec. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

The Nobel Prize in physics is being awarded, a day after 2 Americans won the medicine prize

The Nobel Prize in physics is being awarded, a day after 2 Americans won the medicine prize

FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)