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AI Pioneers Hopfield and "Godfather of AI" Hinton Win 2024 Physics Nobel

Oct 8, 2024, 10:32 AM

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the "Godfather of AI," have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. Their pioneering work in the 1980s laid the groundwork for modern artificial intelligence applications. Hopfield, an American professor at Princeton University, developed the Hopfield network, an associative memory system capable of storing and reconstructing patterns in data. Hinton, a British-Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, built upon Hopfield's work to develop the Boltzmann machine, which can learn to recognize characteristic elements in data. Hinton is notable for becoming the first person to win both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize. The unprecedented awarding of the Physics Nobel to AI researchers underscores the significant impact of their contributions to technologies such as facial recognition and language translation.