Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry: AI recognized
2024-10-09 · Publisher : Académie royale des sciences de Suède · Domain : Artificial Intelligence
On October 8, the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for the foundations of neural networks; on October 9, the Chemistry prize honors David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein design and prediction.
What changes
- Physics (October 8): Hopfield and Hinton, for foundational discoveries that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
- Chemistry (October 9): half to David Baker for computational protein design, half to Hassabis and Jumper for protein structure prediction.
- AlphaFold2 predicted the structure of virtually all 200 million known proteins; more than two million people in 190 countries have used it.
- Two researchers from Google DeepMind, a private company, are honored only four years after their breakthrough.
- Each prize carries 11 million Swedish kronor.
On October 8 and 9, 2024, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded two Nobel Prizes for work related to artificial intelligence. For the first time, AI was recognized both for its theoretical foundations and for a major scientific application. ### What happened - **Physics, October 8**: John J. Hopfield (Princeton) and Geoffrey Hinton (Toronto) were honored “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” In the 1980s, Hopfield designed a network able to store and reconstruct patterns, inspired by spin physics; Hinton used it to build the Boltzmann machine, which learns to recognize characteristic elements in data. - **Chemistry, October 9**: one half of the prize went to David Baker (University of Washington) “for computational protein design”; the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (Google DeepMind) “for protein structure prediction.” ### Key figures | Item | Value | |---|---| | Proteins whose structure AlphaFold2 predicted | virtually all 200 million known | | AlphaFold2 users | more than 2 million, in 190 countries | | AlphaFold2 presented | 2020 | | First entirely new protein designed by David Baker | 2003 | | Amount of each prize | 11 million Swedish kronor | ### Why it is a turning point The Nobel committee acknowledged that machine learning has become a full-fledged tool for scientific discovery. The Chemistry prize also, unusually, honored researchers from a private company for work published four years earlier. ### Caveats The Physics prize sparked debate: some physicists felt neural networks belonged more to computer science than to physics. Geoffrey Hinton, who had left Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI risks, used the award to restate his concerns. ### Key takeaways October 2024 marks AI's entry into the scientific pantheon: its theoretical pioneers and its applications in biology were honored in the same week.
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Tags : IA, Science, Nobel, Réseaux de neurones, AlphaFold