The Nobel Prize in Physics was won by John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for research in artificial intelligence

An American professor and a British-Canadian professor won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their decades of groundbreaking research into the building blocks of artificial intelligence.

John J. Hopfield, 91, received the honor along with Geoffrey E. Hinton, 76, who left his job at Google last year so he could speak freely about his concerns about the technology.

The pair are central figures in the development of modern AI.

Since the 1980s, they have used tools from physics to develop the foundations of so-called “machine learning,” in which computers are fed massive amounts of data to learn a range of tasks – from diagnosing diseases to learning about them people's favorite streaming shows.

Their research “formed the building blocks of machine learning that can help people make faster and more reliable decisions,” Ellen Moons, chairwoman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a news conference.

The use of this technology has “become a part of our daily lives, for example in facial recognition and language translation,” said Moons, while warning that the “rapid development of AI also raises concerns about our future.”

The machine learning revolution can arguably be traced back to Hopfield, a Chicago-born professor emeritus at Princeton University.

In 1982, he invented the “Hopfield network,” a type of neural network – as these machine learning programs are called – that was able to mirror certain functions of the human brain and retrieve “memories” based on only partial information.

Hinton is a British-Canadian professor at the University of Toronto who is often referred to as one of the “godfathers of AI.” He used Hopfield's invention to develop his own network capable of recognizing common characteristics of large amounts of data. An everyday use for this might be to classify many images based on the things they contain.

“I'm in a cheap hotel in California that doesn't have good internet or phone connection,” Hinton said Tuesday, quoted by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the prize. “I wanted to have an MRI scan today, but I have to cancel!”

He worked at Google for a decade and became one of the world's most respected voices on AI. Last May, he publicly quit his job and posted on X that he made the decision “so he could talk about the dangers of AI.”

“It's hard to imagine how you can stop the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton said in an interview with The New York Times.