Hinton, who quit Google in 2023 to warn of AI dangers, was "flabbergasted" at the news.

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.

Until this year, the Nobel Prize for physics has typically gone to pioneers in that field, like last year’s winners who used lasers to make breakthrough discoveries about the electron. But 2024 is the year of artificial intelligence, and apparently the hype has reached even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.