U.S. scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work that laid the foundation for machine learning. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences highlighted that their discoveries, rooted in physics, have contributed to the development of artificial neural networks, which are revolutionizing various fields.
Hopfield, a Princeton professor, created an associative memory model that stores and reconstructs patterns, while Hinton, from the University of Toronto, developed methods that autonomously detect properties in data, enabling tasks like identifying elements in images.
Hinton, an AI pioneer, quit Google in 2023 to freely address the dangers of AI, expressing concerns about computers potentially surpassing human intelligence sooner than expected.
The prize includes 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million), shared between the winners. The Nobel Prize, established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1901, is one of the most prestigious global honors for scientific achievements.
