Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield win Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in foundational AI

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield are jointly sharing the prestigious award for their work on artificial neural networks starting back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

More specifically, Hinton and Hopfield were given the award for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

The news comes as AI has emerged as one of the major driving forces behind what some have dubbed the fourth industrial revolution. Major innovators in the space are being recognized for their work. Earlier this year, Google Deepmind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis was awarded a knighthood in the U.K. for “services to artificial intelligence.”

Hinton is among the world’s most renowned researchers in the field of AI, laying the groundwork for much of the advances we’ve seen these past few years. He has often been referred to as the “godfather of deep learning.” After gaining a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978, Hinton went on to co-create the backpropagation algorithm, a method that allows neural networks to learn from their mistakes, transforming how AI models are trained.

Hinton joined Google in 2013 after the search giant acquired his company DNNresearch. He quit Google last year citing his concerns over the role that AI was playing in the spread of misinformation. Today, Hinton is a professor at the University of Toronto.

Hopfield, a professor at Princeton, was also an early pioneer in some of the foundational work in the realm of AI. He developed what came to be known as the Hopfield network, a type of neural network that transformed AI by demonstrating how neural networks could store and retrieve patterns. It basically mimics how the human memory works and showed how some of the principles of biology and physics could be applied to computational systems.

Nobel Prize winners, also known as “laureates,” receive several rewards in recognition of their work, including a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), which is split between the winners if there is more than one. And obviously, the winners gain global prestige.

“The laureates’ work has already been of the greatest benefit,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement. “In physics, we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties.”