The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to US scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton for their groundbreaking discoveries that laid the foundation for machine learning, the technology at the core of artificial intelligence.

The Nobel Committee announced on Tuesday night that the two laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, approximately Php60.42 million, in recognition of their contributions.

Hopfield is credited with developing an associative memory network, which can store and reconstruct images and other patterns in data.

Hinton, widely regarded as the "father of AI," pioneered a method that enables machines to autonomously recognize characteristic elements in data and generate new examples based on the patterns they were trained on.

"The laureates' work has already been of immense benefit. In physics, we use artificial neural networks in a wide range of applications, including developing new materials with specific properties," said Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

Hopfield, 91, was born in 1933 in Chicago. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and currently serves as a professor at Princeton University.

Meanwhile, 76-year-old Hinton was born in 1947 in London. He earned his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is now a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

Hinton made headlines in 2023 after resigning from tech giant Google amid concerns that computers could surpass human intelligence much sooner than he and other experts had anticipated.

He admitted to regretting some of his research but noted that his actions were based on the knowledge available at the time.

Widely regarded as the most prestigious award for physicists globally, the Nobel Prize was established, along with awards for achievements in science, literature, and peace, in the will of Alfred Nobel.

The prizes have been awarded since 1901, with past recipients including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi.