'It will be comparable with the industrial revolution': Two legendary AI scientists win Nobel Prize in physics for work on neural networks

The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to two scientists who laid the foundations for today's rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI).

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton will share the 11 million Swedish krona ($1.03 million) prize for their work on artificial neural networks and the algorithms that enable machines to learn, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the Nobel laureates in physics, announced Tuesday (Oct. 8).

"I'm flabbergasted, I had no idea this would happen, I'm very surprised," Hinton said by phone at a news conference. He was speaking from a hotel in California with poor internet and a bad phone connection. "I was going to get an MRI scan today, but I think I'll have to cancel that."

Hopfield, a professor in life science at Princeton University, was recognized for creating an associative memory network — which he first proposed as Hopfield network in 1982 — that can save and reconstruct images and other patterns from imperfect data.

Hinton, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, used Hopfield's network in the early 2000s as the foundation for a method known as the "Boltzmann machine." Using tools from statistical physics, Hinton's produced neural networks that can spot patterns in data, enabling them to classify images or create new examples of the patterns it was trained on.

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Taken together, the two advances were fundamental to the development of machine learning, which has since produced an explosion in new AI technologies and applications.