The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton of University of Toronto for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning underpinning many of today’s most powerful artificial-intelligence models.

U.S. scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for discoveries and inventions in machine learning that paved the way for the artificial intelligence boom.

With work on machine learning that uses artificial neural networks, John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “showed a completely new way for us to use computers,” the committee said.