Geoffrey Hinton, the oft-recognized 'Godfather of AI' and now-vocal alarm ringer for an AI-infused future, just won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in – wait for it – training artificial neural networks using physics.

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.

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.