AI research takes two Nobel Prizes in the same week

The 2024 Nobel Prizes went to AI research on two consecutive days. On October 8 the Physics prize went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational work on associative memory and artificial neural networks; Hinton had been at Google from 2013 to 2023 and had spent the time since warning about AI risk. On October 9 the Chemistry prize was divided, one half to David Baker for computational protein design, the other jointly to Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction. Their AlphaFold2, presented in 2020, had made it possible to predict the structures of nearly all of the roughly 200 million proteins researchers had identified. It was the week that mainstream science recognized deep learning head-on — and current and former Google researchers were named on both prizes.