Geoffrey Hinton, the oft-recognized 'Godfather of AI' and now-vocal alarm ringer for an AI-infused future, just won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in – wait for it – training artificial neural networks using physics.

While Hinton’s work catapulted neural networks into the modern era, John J. Hopfield’s earlier breakthroughs laid a crucial foundation.

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton of University of Toronto for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning underpinning many of today’s most powerful artificial-intelligence models.