AI’s "Triumph of Interdisciplinarity": A Deep Dive into the 2024 Nobel Prizes

On 11 October, the 2024 Nobel Prize winners were announced.

Prizes are awarded across the fields of Economics, Literature, Peace, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine and Physics.

This year, prize money for each category amounted to 11M Swedish kronor (≈ 960K EUR).

At Deep, we wanted to know:

Which laureate captured the public’s imagination and received the most media coverage?

To answer this, we used DeepPulse’s ‘Mentions’ tool, which measures how often a given search term appears in online media coverage.

Analysing English language online media coverage over a two week timeframe from 5 to 18 October, we found the following results:

Geoffrey Hinton (Physics): 265 Mentions

Demis Hassabis (Chemistry): 229 Mentions

Han Kang (Literature): 190 Mentions

John Hopfield (Physics): 181 Mentions

Nihon Hidankyo (Peace): 181 Mentions

John Jumper (Chemistry): 158 Mentions

Gary Ruvkun Physiology or Medicine): 126 Mentions

Daron Acemoglu (Economics): 119 Mentions

Victor Ambros (Physiology or Medicine): 105 Mentions

David Baker (Chemistry): 71 Mentions

James Robinson (Economics): 56 Mentions

Simon Johnson (Economics): 51 Mentions

Our analysis reveals that Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI”, received the most media coverage. Digging into the headlines, we can see that AI was this year’s dominant theme, perfectly captured by The Economist’s article ‘AI wins big at the Nobels’.

According to the Nobel Foundation, Hinton received the award “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”.

Hinton shared the Physics Prize with John Hopfield, the fourth most frequently mentioned of the twelve laureates.

AI's influence wasn’t limited to physics. In Chemistry, it was instrumental in the work of David Baker, who received the Prize for "computational protein design." Likewise, the other two Chemistry laureates Demis Hassabis and John Jumper relied upon AI for research into "protein structure prediction."

The work recognised in the Physics and Chemistry Prizes has been hailed as a demonstration of AI’s "triumph of interdisciplinary." This points to the likelihood of even more groundbreaking applications of AI across various scientific fields in the future.

In a world driven by data, turn insight into advantage with DeepPulse.

Special Offer: DeepPulse is free of charge for all journalists until September 2025.