2024 Nobel Prizes: artificial intelligence takes center stage in physics and chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks. A day later, the Chemistry prize went to David Baker, for computational protein design, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, of Google DeepMind, for predicting protein structures with AlphaFold.

It is the first time two science Nobels in the same year have recognized advances directly tied to artificial intelligence. Hinton, who left Google in 2023 to speak freely about the risks of AI, used the occasion to reiterate his warnings.

The Nobel Prize in Literature went to South Korean writer Han Kang, and the Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, the organization of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For science journalism, these awards pose a challenge: explaining rigorously a technology surrounded by both outsized expectations and fears, without falling into sensationalism.

Source: The Nobel Prize.