AIster · The model wars · Events
AI research wins two Nobel Prizes in two days
The Nobel committees recognise AI research in both physics and chemistry
Key facts
- Date
- 8–9 Oct 2024
- Era
- The model wars
- Interest
- Events
- Threads
- Labs & people
- Physics, 8 Oct
- John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton
- Chemistry, 9 Oct
- David Baker; Demis Hassabis and John Jumper
- AlphaFold2
- Structures predicted for virtually all 200 million known proteins
In the space of two days in October 2024, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded two Nobel Prizes for work at the core of modern AI.
Physics, 8 October The physics prize went to John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks". Both did the work from the 1980s onwards. Hopfield created an associative memory, now called the Hopfield network, which stores patterns such as images and can reconstruct them from distorted or incomplete input. It borrows from the physics of atomic spin, which describes magnetic materials. Hinton built on it with the Boltzmann machine, which uses tools from statistical physics to learn the characteristic features of a type of data, and can classify images or create new examples. The Academy said Hinton's later work helped start "the current explosive development of machine learning".
Chemistry, 9 October The next day the chemistry prize was split. One half went to David Baker of the University of Washington "for computational protein design". The other half went jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind in London "for protein structure prediction". In 2020 they presented AlphaFold2, an AI model that predicts the three-dimensional shape of a protein from its sequence of amino acids, a problem researchers had worked on since the 1970s. The Academy said AlphaFold2 had been used to predict the structure of virtually all of the 200 million proteins researchers have identified, and that more than two million people in 190 countries had used it.
Why it mattered Both committees placed the work inside their own fields. The physics committee described the laureates as having used tools from physics to build the foundations of machine learning; the chemistry committee described AlphaFold2 as solving a 50-year-old problem. The awards brought AI research into the Nobel Prizes, and two of the laureates worked at Google DeepMind, one of the companies competing to build the most capable AI models.
Questions people ask
Who won the Nobel Prize for AI in 2024?
On 8 October 2024 John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics prize for work that enables machine learning with artificial neural networks. On 9 October Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared half the chemistry prize for AlphaFold's protein structure prediction; David Baker won the other half.
Why did Geoffrey Hinton win a Nobel Prize in physics?
The Academy cited foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. Hinton's Boltzmann machine built on Hopfield's network using tools from statistical physics.
Sources
- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (nobelprize.org), The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024: Press release, 2024-10-08
- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (nobelprize.org), The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024: Press release, 2024-10-09