AI is having a moment at this year’s Nobel Prizes. Earlier this week, the physics prize was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, two pioneering AI researchers who made progress in training artificial neural networks. The next day, DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with American biochemist David Baker, for creating an AI model that can predict the structure of all proteins.
Some scientists, including the laureates themselves, were left shocked by the dominance of AI this year. Hinton said he was “delighted” by the honor and noted at a subsequent press conference that he did not consider himself a physicist. “I have a lot of respect for physics. “I dropped out of physics in my first year at university because I couldn’t do complex math, so receiving the physics award was a big surprise to me,” he said.
For others, the presence of new technologies in prestigious science awards showed the full power of their influence in all fields, including science. While Huimin Zhao, chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told the Observer that he was “very surprised” to learn about the focus of AI on the chemistry prize, the scientist described Hassabis and Jumper’s AlphaFold AI program as “revolutionary. . ” The 2020 breakthrough from the duo solved a problem scientists have been working on for 50 years and is arguably the “biggest use of AI in the scientific domain,” Zhao said.
The Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized Hinton and Hopfield for decades of work that laid the foundation for today’s AI revolution, is a prize that “celebrates interdisciplinary diversity,” said Michael Moloney, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, in a statement. Respecting how physics has driven the development of computer algorithms, it also “shows that fundamental changes in our understanding of science can sometimes take decades to have a broad impact,” he said.
Is it time for the Nobel Prizes to review their categories?
Although new Nobel laureates have been won, this year’s awards have reignited debate over whether the Nobel Prizes should modernize their categories to reflect current scientific fields. Hinton himself noted in the interview that his work would be most worthy of a Nobel Prize in computer science. Meanwhile, Hassabis pointed out that the concept of computer science did not even exist when the awards were first created more than a century ago.
The prizes remain in line with the wishes set out in the 1895 will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who asked that his estate be used to fund annual prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, peace and literature. The Nobel Foundation, which manages Nobel’s fortune, has given no indication that it intends to change the categories and describes the addition of the prize in economics in 1968 as “unique.”
Unlike other prizes, the economics prize is sponsored by Sveriges Riksbank—Sweden’s largest bank—and is not an official Nobel Prize but rather marked “in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” Its establishment coincided with the 300th anniversary of Sveriges Riksbank, said the bank in a statement sent to the Observer.
This is not the first time that the scientific community has urged the Nobel Prizes to add new awards. In 2009, a group of researchers and academics including Tim Hunt, who received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, wrote a letter to the Nobel Foundation asking it to practice recognizing emerging disciplines such as global ecology and public health, basic biology and behavioral science. “We are grateful that the foundation is bound by Nobel’s will. But we also note that the foundation has shown flexibility in the past,” reads the letter, which did not result in a new addition.
While AI’s sweep of this year’s awards is unlikely to inspire any significant changes to the awards themselves, researchers say they will give the new technology’s capabilities across science more credibility. Prizes going back to physics and chemistry will encourage more scientists to use AI, according to Zhao. “Now, we’re starting to see the power of AI in scientific discovery,” he said. “I can say that this is the beginning.”
