Every year there is disagreement about who should have won the Nobel Prize. But this year, the physics and chemistry awards might be considered the most controversial yet. Amidst claims of the committee succumbing to the AI hype I spoke to Dr Emma King-Smith, Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh researching the intersection of chemistry and Artificial Intelligence, to get to the bottom of this controversy.
The AI-related prizes
In physics, the 2024 Nobel Prize was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton:
More specifically, Hopfield invented a model for associative memory that can retrieve known patterns from an imperfect or incomplete pattern. The Hopfield model finds the saved image that is most like the imperfect one it was fed with, an important feature of the large artificial neuron networks many of us use today.
Hinton (dubbed the ‘godfather of AI’) built on Hopfield’s research by using tools from statistical physics to create the Boltzmann machine, a tool which can recognise characteristic elements in a set of data. This eventually led to a neural network programme that, after being given training pictures, could “recognise, classify and even generate images”, in essence carrying out unsupervised learning.
In chemistry, the Nobel Prize was centred on proteins. One half of the prize was handed to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (receiving a quarter of the prize each):
“for protein structure prediction”.
Hassabis and Jumper were awarded their share of the prize for their creation of the ‘AlphaFold2’ programme which solved a 50-year mystery by predicting the structure of all known proteins. This invention has had widespread impacts across pharmaceutical and environmental research.
Sneaky, Sneaky AI
There are no doubts that the creations and discoveries of the recent Nobel Prize winners are both impressive and noteworthy. Yet, with so many other notable individuals to choose from, many have wondered why give three awards to AI-related work and can their work really be considered traditional physics or traditional chemistry?
Following the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award two categories of prizes to AI-related work, it’s understandable to see individuals making claims along the lines of:
“we’re so obsessed with computer scientists that we’re willing to slot them in anywhere.”
The internet is now filled with debates evaluating to what extent the work of the prize winners can be considered physics or chemistry. While there are many who doubt the work of all four noble prize winners, the most controversial yet is the awarding of the prize to Hinton. There are widespread claims that Hinton is a computer scientist and to consider him a physicist is quite a leap.
Yet, if that’s the case, then how do we draw the boundaries between disciplines? Is it possible that the way the prizes were awarded is just a reflection of an increasingly interdisciplinary world of science?
Science: increasingly interdisciplinary?
I asked Emma whether she believes that scientific discoveries in general are becoming more interdisciplinary and whether it is possible to have a purely chemistry or purely physics prize.
Emma replied that while she thinks it’s still possible to win Nobel Prizes for fundamental research, quoting Barry Sharpless and Dave Macmillan as examples of classic organic chemists, there are some intrinsic challenges.
E: “It’s obviously harder to get fundamental research into a Nobel Prize, because it is all about impact. And fundamental research is fundamental, it’s not always about how this is going to be an immediate help for society.”
In fact, Emma suggests that in academia there has been a general shift away from pure fundamental research to much more intersectional and interdisciplinary research. She attributes two reasons for this shift, the first is a cultural shift in science away from individualistic work and more toward collaborative work. The second reason is that the funding for smaller projects which don’t cross disciplines and bring together large teams is harder to come by. This means that academics are having to make their research more interdisciplinary to get the grants they need to continue their work.
Funding makes the world (of academia) go around
Hearing about how much funding and grant allocations had impacted content of research and how it was being carried out, I wondered to what extent the ‘AI hype’ had impacted research. I asked Emma if she thought there was a risk of academics incorporating AI into their research without really knowing how, just to jump on the AI trend.
Emma told me that this wasn’t a risk, it was a reality. Though she warned that it can get to a saturation point where nobody really knows what good or bad practices are anymore, Emma was surprisingly positive about this trend:
E: “As scientists and academics we are inherently curious and want to see what the latest tool is doing and how can this better us… It’s a good thing, it can be a bad thing, especially if it becomes over-saturated, but I think it’s important to encourage people to at least experiment and play with the state of the art that we have, because how else are we going to push forward?”
Was the Committee being strategic?
Others have speculated that in awarding the physics prizes the way they did, the Nobel Prize committee was trying to make a statement: that AI owes a lot to physics, particularly statistical physics, and that it is now possible to win prizes for AI-related work.
On the other hand, Professor Dame Wendy Hall suggests that the lack of prize for mathematics or computer science distorted the outcome and that in classifying the work as physics, the committee was trying to find a way to reward individuals for work in these areas.
Biggest Impact Theory
Perhaps the most widely circulated theory as to why the committee choose to award the prizes the way it did, was to simply jump on the AI hype trend. In asking Emma what she thought about this claim, she seemed to think that rather than simply jumping on a trend, it was likely that the committee was trying to find a way to acknowledge the immense impact AI is likely to have on our future.
It is often the case that the Nobel Prize committee targets discoveries with the biggest impact on our future. Satyen K Bordoloi seems to take a similar view to that of Emma’s and suggests that “The Nobel Committee does not necessarily award ‘potential’ but ‘repercussion.’ They acknowledge work not just with a lasting impact but which can spark more research for decades.”
While it makes sense for the committee to acknowledge the creators of a new technology that will likely have an immense impact on our future, Emma had some comments on the timing of the prize:
E: “I think to say that it was Nobel Prize worthy at this stage might be a little premature, typically you get a Nobel Prize in something because it has shown real impact for society and humanity at large. While I think AI is going to do that, I don’t think it has been around long enough for us to make that call…
I think AI will have that level of impact, but it’s just so young that I don’t think you can really say it has changed all of our lives forever, in a way that we fully grasp and understand.”
Nobel Prize: a relic?
Like every year, the spotlight shines on some and there are those whose fundamental efforts are left in the shadows. Vivek Wadhwa makes the strong case that the Nobel Prize is fundamentally flawed in that it doesn’t acknowledge the full spectrum of contributions: “The myth of the lone genius, often epitomized by figures like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, dominates public narratives, leading us to believe that major breakthroughs occur in isolation. In reality, most advances result from cumulative, collaborative efforts.” Wadhwa suggests that the Nobel Prize fails to understand the nature of innovation itself.
E: “I think this is a bigger problem and a bigger question beyond just the Nobel Prize. Science is a very incremental field, and we all stand on the backs of giants. Everything we do is because of people before us making small improvements to the science previously… It’s not unique to the Nobel Prize and it’s not unique to this year, it is a historical artefact of science and the way that crediting really happens in the sciences.”
When I asked Emma if she ever dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize her reply was both touching and inspiring:
E: “Every young scientist that is trying to make it will always have that dream, it is like winning an Oscar. But it is about as political as winning an Oscar. I wouldn’t say that’s the goal that we have at the back of our mind when doing research, we want to do research that excites us and inspires us. And sometimes that leads to breakthroughs that we could never have imagined and that’s wonderful, but sometimes it doesn’t and it’s just for the sake of our own small community, and that’s just as powerful as well.”
Written by Celene Sandiford, smartR AI