Geoffrey Hinton, known as the 'godfather of AI', and John Hopfield have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational work on artificial neural networks. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners in Stockholm, honouring their contributions to machine learning.
Hopfield, 91, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, created an associative memory network that can store and reconstruct patterns, mimicking the brain's memory storage. Hinton, 76, a British-Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, built on this by incorporating probabilities into multilayered networks, enabling recognition, classification, and generation of images.
Their work, beginning in the 1980s, laid the groundwork for modern AI applications such as language translation, facial recognition, and generative AI like ChatGPT. Hinton quit Google last year to speak freely about AI risks, including misinformation, job displacement, and existential threats.
Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel committee, noted that these networks have advanced physics research and become part of daily life. Hinton, surprised by the award, said AI's impact would rival the Industrial Revolution but warned of potential dangers if systems become smarter than humans.
The winners share 11 million Swedish kronor (about £810,000). Professor Michael Wooldridge of Oxford called the award a recognition of AI's transformative role in science, while Professor Dame Wendy Hall expressed surprise, noting there is no Nobel for computer science.
