The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. Jeff Hinton and John Hopfield will jointly share the prestigious award for their research in artificial neural networks, which began in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Specifically, Hinton and Hopfield received the award for their “fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
The news comes as AI emerges as one of the key drivers behind what some are calling the fourth industrial revolution. Major innovators in this field are recognized for their work. Earlier this year, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google Deepmind, was knighted in the UK for his “contributions to artificial intelligence.”
Hinton is one of the world's best-known researchers in the field of AI, laying the foundation for many of the advances we've seen in recent years. He has often been called the “godfather of deep learning.” After receiving his PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978, Hinton continued to co-develop backpropagation algorithms. This is how neural networks can learn from their mistakes and has revolutionized the way AI models are trained.
Hinton joined Google in 2013 after the search giant acquired his company, DNNresearch. He left Google last year, citing concerns about AI's role in spreading misinformation. Hinton is currently a professor at the University of Toronto.
Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, was also an early pioneer in some of the basic research in the field of AI. He developed what became known as the Hopfield Network. This is a type of neural network that has revolutionized AI by demonstrating how neural networks can store and retrieve patterns. It basically mimicked how human memory works and showed how some of the principles of biology and physics can be applied to computational systems.
Nobel Prize winners, also known as “Laureates,” receive prize money in recognition of their achievements, including a gold medal, a certificate, and a prize of 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million). is plural. And obviously, the winner will gain worldwide fame.
“The laureates' research has already yielded the greatest benefits,” Ellen Moons, head of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement. “Artificial neural networks are used in a wide range of fields in physics, including the development of new materials with specific properties.”