The physicists received the award for ‘foundational discoveries’ that paved the way for the current boom in Artificial Intelligence technologies.
Scientists John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton on Tuesday won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on machine learning that paved the way for the current boom in Artificial Intelligence technologies.
The two physicists received the award “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry.
“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in Physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” said the organisation.
John Hopfield created an “associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data”, whereas Geoffrey Hinton invented a method to autonomously find properties in data, which allows Artificial Intelligence to perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
