Artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks… it’s no longer a futuristic dream, but a phenomenon we encounter every day in the form of ChatGPT, Gemini et cetera, something its discoverers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton probably never thought possible. John Hopfield created an associative memory that could store and reconstruct images and other kinds of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can find properties in data on its own, performing tasks such as identifying specific elements in images.

But the technology has now gone far beyond these popular applications and, after a short gestation period, has taken deep root in the chemical and life sciences. This is reflected in our relatively recent stories on how AI helps protein optimisation in the start-up Cradle, an opinion piece about how AI has reached (in)organic chemistry, an interview with Gerard van Westen about how AI and machine learning help in discovering leads for new drugs, and the connection between machine learning and chromatography in the lab of Deirdre Cabooter.

All in all, a Nobel Prize with clear social as well as scientific relevance.