Physics and artificial intelligence: illuminating the future of optics and photonics

Abstract

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their pioneering work on artificial neural networks, which profoundly impacted the physical sciences, particularly optics and photonics. This perspective summarizes the Nobel laureates’ contributions, highlighting the physics-based principles and inspiration behind the development of modern artificial intelligence (AI) and also outlining some of the emerging major advances achieved in optics and photonics enabled by AI.