Two scientists credited with laying the “foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” University of Toronto professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton and Princeton University professor John Hopfield, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today.

U.S. scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian colleague Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that laid the foundation for machine learning, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.

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.