Two pioneers of AI win Nobel prize in physics for work on machine learning

Two researchers who helped lay the foundations for modern artificial intelligence - although one later warned of its potential harms - have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physics.

- Ian Sample

American John Hopfield, and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton built artificial neural networks that could store and retrieve memories like the human brain, and learn from information fed into them.

Hinton, 76, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who is often called "the godfather of AI", made headlines last year when he quit Google and warned of the dangers of machines outsmarting humans.

The scientists' pioneering work began in the 1980s and demonstrated how computer programs that draw on neural networks and statistics could form the basis for an entire field, which paved the way for swift and accurate language translation, facial recognition systems, and the generative AI that underpins chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.

Hopfield, 91, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, was honoured for building "an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data", while Hinton invented a method that can “independently discover properties in data", a feature of the large artificial neural networks in use today.