"I’m very unnerved by something which has no control,” Princeton University professor John J. Hopfield said hours after winning the Nobel Prize in physics.

While Hinton’s work catapulted neural networks into the modern era, John J. Hopfield’s earlier breakthroughs laid a crucial foundation.

On October 8, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to a computer scientist and a physicist for “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” according to the New York Times.