The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that it had decided on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024, which would be going to Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield for his work on artificial neural networks contributions from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Put simply, Hinton and Hopfield had been awarded the prize based on "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.".

The news comes at a time when AI has turned into one of the strong driving forces of what some describe as the fourth industrial revolution. Innovators in the space are winning accolades. This year, for example, Google Deepmind co-founder and Chief Executive Demis Hassabis was knighted in the U.K. for "services to artificial intelligence."

Hinton is considered one of the worlds most accomplished experts in AI, laying some of the foundational work that we see happening today. He has often been described as the "godfather of deep learning." With his PhD in artificial intelligence since 1978, Hinton, along with his other coauthors, had developed the backpropagation algorithm. The technique allows neural networks to learn through a process of identifying their mistakes, thereby changing the model structure applied in AI models.

He joined Google in 2013 after the search giant acquired his company DNNresearch. He quit Google last year, citing his concerns over the role that AI played in the spread of misinformation. Today, Hinton is a professor at the University of Toronto.

That was Hopfield, professor of Princeton and one of the very early pioneers with foundational work within the field of AI. He developed what came to be known as the Hopfield network, that type of neural network, transforming AI because it demonstrated the ability of neural networks to store and retrieve patterns. It basically mimics how the human memory works, and some of the principles of biology and physics could be applied to computational systems.

The laureate receives several prizes for the work done: a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), split if there are multiple winners. And of course, they gain world glory.
"The work of laureates has already made the highest contribution," Ellen Moons, the chair of Nobel Committee for Physics, stated in a release. "In physics, artificial neural networks have been used in a gigantic number of fields, such as designing novel materials with particular properties,"