The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for their “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
This year’s laureates, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, used principles from physics to develop methods that laid the groundwork for today’s powerful machine learning systems. Hopfield created a structure that can store and retrieve information, while Hinton invented a method that can independently discover properties in data. This has become essential for the large artificial neural networks in use today.
Though computers themselves cannot think, machines now mimic functions like memory and learning. The 2024 Nobel Prize laureates in physics have made this possible by applying key concepts from physics to develop technologies that use network structures to process information. Their contributions have shaped the evolution of machine learning, enabling the impressive capabilities we see in AI systems today.
