But setting aside the issues of reliability and utility, I think this award is less about the suitability of generative AI as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics than the lack of fundamental advances in the foundations of physics, and even halting progress in innovations in condensed matter physics, superconductivity, controlled nuclear fusion, et cetera. Despite all of the hype from the pop-sci press there have been little fundamental innovation in basic understanding of the physical nature of the universe, and in the last quarter century the Nobel Prize has been awarded either for work done decades prior, confirmations of widely accepted phenomena such as supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, broad “contributions” to a general field like cosmology or superfluidity, or technological applications such as integrated circuits and laser physics. With a couple of debatable awards, the last really fundamental work in physics recognized by the Nobel committee was the 1999 Prize award to Gerard ‘t Hooft and Martinus Veltman for their work on the quantum structure of electroweak interactions. (One could make the argument for the 2004 prize to Gross, Politzer, and Wilczek, and perhaps the 2012 award to Haroche and Wineland, but the others are mostly awards for technological innovations of already known physics or awards to a small number of contributors for much broader work in a field.)
We may be at a point that the synthesis and comprehension of physical theory and scientific observation are approaching a capability limit of human cognition, inspiration, and collaboration, and that some kind of more advanced generative “AI tools” will be necessary for real advances in physics (and systems biology and neuroscience, climate and weather projection, complexity theory, et cetera), and indeed this is already occurring in tentative ways in many fields. LLMs and the neural network approach to machine cognition is still quite nascent and currently a computationally brute force approach to problem-solving but it may very well be the first steps to radical advances is foundational physics and our ability to interpret and manipulate the natural world. Whether we will actually control such innovations is another question, but the award to Hinton and Hopfield is not without merit and foresight.
Stranger