What happens when public knowledge is created on private infrastructure?

O ver the past year, a considerable amount of recognition for Machine Learning (ML) has gone to researchers working in or alongside large technology firms, even as recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been financed and built on corporate infrastructure.

In 2024, the Nobel Foundation awarded the physics prize to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for contributions that enabled learning with artificial neural networks, and the chemistry prize to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction (alongside David Baker’s computational design). Mr. Hassabis and Mr. Jumper were employed at Google DeepMind at the time of the award; Mr. Hinton had spent a decade at Google before departing in 2023. These affiliations don’t erase the laureates’ academic histories but t