Key Points
Demis Hassabis didnt know he was getting the Nobel Prize in chemistry from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences until his wife started being bombarded with calls from a Swedish number on Skype...
That he won the prizethe most prestigious in sciencemay not have been all that much of a shock: A day earlier, Geoffrey Hinton, often called one of the godfathers of AI, and Princeton Universitys John Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on machine learning..
In case it wasnt clear: AI is here, and its now possible to win a Nobel Prize by studying it and contributing to other fieldswhether physics in the case of Hinton and Hopfield or chemistry in the case of Hassabis and Jumper, who won alongside David Baker, a University of Washington genome scientist...
The extent to which academics are likely to follow the media attention, money, and Nobel Prize committee plaudits is a question that vexes Julian Togelius, an associate professor of computer science at New York Universitys Tandon School of Engineering who works on AI..
Theres also the risk that overconfident computer scientists, who have helped advance the field of AI, start to see AI work being awarded Nobel Prizes in unrelated scientific fieldsin this instance, physics and chemistryand decide to follow in their footsteps, encroaching on other peoples turf..
