Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are awarded for machine learning
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton on 8 October for foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks. The Chemistry prize followed the next day, half to David Baker for computational protein design and half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction.
Background
Hopfield described his network in 1982. It is formally equivalent to a simplified model of a magnetic system at zero temperature, of the kind statistical physics had used for decades, which is the connection the physics citation rests on. Hinton followed in 1983 with the Boltzmann machine, adding hidden units to Hopfield’s arrangement.
Neither man was working on a physics problem in the ordinary sense. Hopfield’s own account is that physics is not defined by which problem you take up but by how you go about solving it.
What happened
On 8 October 2024 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Hopfield and Hinton, for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.
The Chemistry prize was announced the following day. Half went to David Baker for computational protein design, and half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences, a problem that had stood for about fifty years.
What followed
The objection came quickly and has not gone away: that both prizes were awarded for computer algorithms rather than for contributions to physics and chemistry as those disciplines have understood themselves.
It is a reasonable objection and it is not obviously right. The work is not in a third place; it sits inside both, and the awards say something about where the boundaries of a discipline now lie rather than settling where they should.
What is not in dispute is the recognition itself. A field that had spent decades outside the established sciences was given their highest honour twice in two days.
Why it mattered
Two prizes on consecutive days for work that is, by any ordinary description, computer science. The awards were contested on exactly that ground: that they recognised algorithms rather than contributions to physics and chemistry as those disciplines have understood themselves.
Sources
- AI pioneers win 2024 Nobel prizes. nature.com. Secondary
- Artificial Intelligence awarded two Nobel Prizes for innovations that will shape the future of medicine. nature.com. Secondary
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. nobelprize.org. Official
Cite this page
AI Achievements. (2024). Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are awarded for machine learning. Retrieved 2026-08-29, from https://achievements.ai/milestone/nobel-prizes-2024-machine-learning
@misc{achievements_nobel_prizes_2024_machine_learning,
title = {Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are awarded for machine learning},
author = {{AI Achievements}},
year = {2024},
url = {https://achievements.ai/milestone/nobel-prizes-2024-machine-learning}
}