While Hinton’s work catapulted neural networks into the modern era, John J. Hopfield’s earlier breakthroughs laid a crucial foundation.

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton of University of Toronto for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning underpinning many of today’s most powerful artificial-intelligence models.

On October 8, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to a computer scientist and a physicist for “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” according to the New York Times.