The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for discoveries in the field of machine learning and neural networks

The laureates were American John Hopfield and British Geoffrey Hinton, who is often referred to as the "godfather of artificial intelligence."

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for discoveries in the field of machine learning and neural networks. This was announced by the Nobel Committee. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences highlighted the scientists' contributions to "fundamental discoveries and inventions that advanced machine learning using artificial neural networks." In particular, Hopfield developed "associative memory" — a method that allows the recovery of images or other types of data, even if they are partially distorted.

This approach is based on the physical properties of atoms and works on the principle of finding the "closest match" among stored data. Hinton, building on Hopfield's work, created a neural network called the "Boltzmann machine." During its training, the network began to recognize key elements in images.

In 2012, Hinton, along with his graduate students Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky, developed a neural network capable of analyzing thousands of photos and accurately identifying objects in them. In 2013, Google acquired their startup DNNResearch. Hinton worked for the corporation until 2023, but left due to ethical disagreements over AI development.

According to him, generative AI could contribute to the spread of misinformation: "You might no longer be able to know what is true." Ilya Sutskever co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and was the chief scientist of the startup. However, in May 2024, after a corporate conflict, he announced his departure from the company. Following this, he launched his own AI startup, Safe Superintelligence, and secured $1 billion in investments.