How does it feel to win a Nobel Prize? Ask the ‘Godfather of AI.’

On Tuesday, scientists John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton received the Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries that helped drive the development of artificial neural networks — a technology that is now essential to the operation of search engines like Google and online chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI.

The prize was given for a technology that Hopfield developed in the early 1980s called a Hopfield network and a related technique that Hinton helped create in the years that followed called a Boltzmann machine. The news surprised many physicists and artificial intelligence experts, including Hopfield and Hinton.