The Nobel Prizes go to neural networks

On 8 October 2024 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks", citing the Hopfield network of 1982 and the Boltzmann machine of 1985. Physicists argued about whether the work was physics. The next day the chemistry prize went half to David Baker for computational protein design and half to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold, four years after CASP14, one of the fastest recognitions in the prize's history.

Hinton took the call in a hotel in California and said he was flabbergasted. He used the press conference and later the Nobel lecture to repeat the warning he had given on leaving Google: that the technology might become more intelligent than its makers and that no one knew how to keep it under control.

The prizes are on this timeline as the moment the establishment of science absorbed the field. Work that had been unfundable in 1975 and unfashionable in 1995 was, by 2024, the most honoured research in the world, and the same year's laureate was its most prominent doubter.