The Big Ten and SEC already have the upper hand in college football. At meetings this week, their leaders are setting the stage to exact even more control over the sport's future.
Among the talking points when an advisory group made of members from the conferences meets in Nashville, Tennessee, are the future of the expanded college football playoff and a possible scheduling agreement between the two conferences that would indirectly make it harder for the rest of college football to compete for the 12 or possibly 14 spots available in the postseason.
No final decisions are expected this week, though the discussions are expected to be a jumping-off point for more definitive moves to come. Here's a look at some of the topics:
The new 12-team playoff makes its debut this season. The top five conference winners, as ranked in the College Football Playoff committee's selection poll on Dec. 8, will earn spots in the postseason, followed by the next seven highest-rated teams.
It's likely that two teams will be added to the format beginning in 2026, which is also when ESPN's six-year, $7.8 billion contract to televise the playoffs begin. Big Ten and SEC leaders have made proposals to get three or four automatic spots in the new playoff. Neither idea has been popular among the rest of the conferences, but the SEC and Big Ten have negotiated to have more control over what comes next.
In possibly the most simple-to-digest sign of the power these two conference wield — they have 15 teams in this week's AP Top 25.
Connected to the playoff format is a possible change in scheduling that would add an interconference Big Ten-SEC game to each team's schedule.
Part of what the conferences would like to achieve with the new postseason format and more automatic bids would be to eliminate the influence of the selection committee, whose poll doles out at-large berths.
To whatever extent the subjective poll remains part of the formula, a Big Ten-SEC matchup in the regular season would ostensibly help both conferences by improving their strength of schedule, which is a factor in the poll. It would also shrink the number of available opportunities schools from other conferences would have against these teams from the top two leagues.
On Monday, a judge approved a plan that sets in motion the system for schools to eventually make direct payments to athletes. It will change the fundamental nature of college sports, and the two biggest conferences will feel as big an impact as anyone.
Specifically, the athletic departments will have to figure out how to replace up to $21.5 million they could be paying athletes as part of a first-of-its-kind revenue-sharing agreement. This is where payouts from the football playoff and even revenue from an extra marquee regular-season game could come into play, though that won't fully solve the problem.
“There’s two ways to get there,” Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman said at the Big Ten's recent basketball media days. “You can either make more money or you can spend your money differently, and we’re working very aggressively on both of those fronts to put ourselves in a position to fully participate in the revenue share when it opens up next year.”
The leaders also have to take educated guesses about how other legal and legislative action could impact them in the future. For instance, if players are deemed to be employees of the schools, it would add another layer of expense for the schools while potentially giving athletes access to school-funded health insurance and other benefits.
One news tidbit that could become a trend: Last month's announcement that Tennessee was slapping a 10% “talent fee” onto the price of next year's season tickets to help offset costs associated with the revenue-sharing plan.
Though not on their agenda, the possibility of a super league hovers over everything in college sports these days.
Earlier this month, a group called “College Sports Tomorrow” unveiled its vision for a two-tiered, 136-team mega-league with divisions and a 24-team playoff.
“This is not trying to create minor league professional football,” one of the group's leaders, former MLS deputy commissioner Mark Abbott, told the Wall Street Journal. “This is about the student athlete and actually trying to enhance the college experience for everybody.”
Then, this week, Yahoo Sports reported on a potential super league involving the top four conferences that would pump $9 billion in private equity money into the sport.
There's not enough room to list all the roadblocks in the way of these sort of changes — tops on the list might be that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has indicated he has no interest — but at the rate college sports are changing these days, it's hard to say never.
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FILE - Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti speaks during an NCAA college football news conference at the Big Ten Conference media days at Lucas Oil Stadium, July 23, 2024, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)
FILE - Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey speaks during SEC NCAA college football media days, July 15, 2024, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Jeffrey McWhorter, File)
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 for humanity.
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.
The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives," said Ellen Moons of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton's, told The Associated Press, “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had."
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.
“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 also mentioned fears about the 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, who quit a role at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create, shares those concerns.
“I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton said.
For his part, Hopfield, who signed early petitions by researchers calling for strong control of the technology, compared the risks and benefits to work on viruses and nuclear energy, capable of helping and harming society. At a Princeton news conference, he made reference to the concerns, bringing up the dystopia imagined in George Orwell's “1984,” or the fictional apocalypse inadvertently created by a Nobel-winning physicist in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.”
Hopfield, who was staying with his wife at a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after grabbing coffee and getting his flu shot, he opened his computer to a flurry of activity.
“I’ve never seen that many emails in my life,” he said. A bottle of champagne and bowl of soup were waiting, he added, but he doubted there were any fellow physicists in town to join the celebration.
Hinton 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.
Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation instrumental in training machines how to “learn" by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns, 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.
Hinton had an unconventional background as a psychologist who also dabbled in carpentry and was genuinely curious about how the mind works, said protege Nick Frosst, who was Hinton’s first hire at Google’s AI division in Toronto.
His “playfulness and genuine interest in answering fundamental questions I think is key to his success as a scientist,” Frosst said.
Nor did he stop at his pioneering 1980s work.
“He’s been consistently trying out crazy things and some of them work very well and some of them don’t,” Frosst said. “But they all have contributed to the success of the field and galvanized other researchers to try new things as well.”
Hinton's team at the University of Toronto wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That spawned a flurry of copycats and was “a very, very significant moment in hindsight and in the course of AI history,” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.
“Many people consider that the birth of modern AI,” she said.
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 told the AP in 2019. "My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what you are doing is silly.”
Many of Hinton's former students and collaborators followed him into the tech industry as it began capitalizing on AI innovations, and some started their own AI companies, including Frosst's Cohere and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Hinton said he uses machine learning tools in his daily life.
“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4,” 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.”
Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.
Just as Hinton came to the field from psychology, Hopfield stressed how cutting edge science comes from crossing the borders of scientific fields like physics, biology and chemistry instead of researchers staying in their lane. It's why this prize is a physics prize, he said, pointing out that his neural network borrows from condensed matter physics.
With big complex problems in scientific fields, “if you are not motivated by physics, you just don't tackle the class of problems,” Hopfield said.
While there's no Nobel for computer science, Li said that awarding a traditional science prize to AI pioneers is significant and shows how boundaries between disciplines have blurred.
Not all of Hinton's peers agree with him about the risks of the technology he helped create.
Frosst has had many “spirited debates” with Hinton about AI’s risks and disagrees with some of Hinton’s warnings but not his willingness to publicly address them.
“Mostly we disagree on timescale and on the particular technology that he’s sounding the alarm on,” Frosst said. “I don’t think that neural nets and language models as they exist today pose an existential risk.”
Bengio, who has long sounded alarms about AI risks, said what really alarms him and Hinton is “loss of human control” and whether AI systems will act morally when they're smarter than humans.
“We don’t know the answer to these questions,” he said. "And we should make sure we do before we build those machines.”
Asked whether the Nobel committee might have factored in Hinton’s warnings when deciding on the award, Bengio dismissed that, saying “we’re talking about very early work when we thought that everything would be rosy.”
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. They continue with the chemistry prize Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
The 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.
O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Borenstein reported from Washington. AP reporters Mike Corder at The Hague, Netherlands; Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York and Kelvin Chan in London contributed.
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)
