Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on October 8 for their four decades of work on artificial neural networks. They will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.06 million).

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The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 8, 2024, and went to two scientists, John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton. Photo: Xinhua

Mr. Hinton, 76, is by far the more famous. Along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, he is known as the “godfather of AI.”

In 2023, he abruptly left Google and publicly warned about the short- and long-term risks of the technology he helped create. He said he regretted how easily AI could be misused.

Neither Hopfield nor Hinton were the first to develop artificial neural networks. However, Hopfield, 91, helped lay the groundwork for today’s AI with a 1982 paper describing a brain-inspired network that could store and recall patterns, with the ability to find the best match.

A few years later, Hinton and two other researchers (David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski) used the Hopfield network as the basis for their invention of what is known as the Boltzmann machine—another network model architecture that can classify images and iterate on training material, although the Boltzmann machine is not as scalable as today's machine learning systems.

Hinton is perhaps better known, however, for his work with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams on "gradient descent", a method that allows large, multilayer neural networks to learn efficiently.

There is currently no Nobel Prize for AI or computer science.

According to Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Physics Committee, the work of Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield has had the greatest benefits. “In physics, we use artificial neural networks in a wide range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties.”

Hopfield and Hinton's work draws on the field of statistical physics, along with neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and more. Two years ago, Hopfield was awarded the Boltzmann Medal for statistical physics.

(According to Fortune)