The list of Nobel laureates reads like a collection of humanity’s greatest treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it also includes two physicists whose research, in the 1980s, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

A Princeton University professor is one of two men receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for work in artificial intelligence. Professor John Hopfield and University of Toronto Professor Geoffrey Hinton received the honor.

Until this year, the Nobel Prize for physics has typically gone to pioneers in that field, like last year’s winners who used lasers to make breakthrough discoveries about the electron. But 2024 is the year of artificial intelligence, and apparently the hype has reached even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.