Nobel sparks debate as AI pioneers honoured for neural nets, not physics

Honoured for neural nets, Hopfield and Hinton's Nobel raises questions on awarding contributions outside traditional physics

The 2024 Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to two living legends of computer science. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were pioneers in conceptualising neural nets. They separately wrote seminal papers that led to the establishment of the field of machine learning (ML), which is foundational to the development of artificial intelligence (AI). However, as even the prize citation makes clear, while the two awardees used tools adapted from physics to create neural nets and drive research in ML, they did not directly make contributions to the discipline of physics. This is why the award has