John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton Win 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for Machine Learning with Neural Networks

Oct 8, 2024, 10:13 AM

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award on Tuesday. Hopfield, from Princeton University, created an associative memory network that can store and reconstruct images and other patterns in data, while Hinton, from the University of Toronto, developed the Boltzmann machine, which can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data. Their work laid the foundation for modern artificial intelligence models, including applications like ChatGPT. Hinton is also notable for being the first person to win both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize.