Science Enormous influence of Nobel Prize-winning research today

Researchers awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics have laid the foundations for today's artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT. According to a Swiss expert, the influence of this research today is enormous.

"No matter where you look, neural networks are everywhere," said computer science professor Benjamin Grewe from the University of Zurich (UZH) and ETH Zurich to the Keystone-SDA news agency. For example, in driverless cars, in language models such as Chat-GPT, or in AI models that predict protein folding.

This year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, John Hopfield (91) from the USA and Geoffrey Hinton (76) from Canada, laid the foundations for today's powerful machine learning several decades ago.

Grewe is not surprised that they are only receiving the award today. "Back then, nobody realized that this would go through the roof," said Grewe. Basic research often had no direct application.

Today, researchers are trying to further develop neural networks so that they require less energy. To do this, they are trying to imitate the brain's algorithms.

SDA