AI pioneers scoop 2025 QE Prize for Engineering

Seven engineers honoured for groundbreaking contributions to machine learning, shaping the future of AI across industries

SEVEN engineers behind the rise of the artificial intelligence technologies that are revolutionising industries and transforming how we live and work have been awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

The annual prize, awarded to engineers whose innovations have benefited humanity on a global scale, was given to the seven engineers for their collective contributions to the development of modern machine learning. They are Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, Yann LeCun, Jensen Huang, Bill Dally, and Fei-Fei Li.

Modern machine learning enables systems to learn from data, recognise patterns, and make predictions without explicit programming. It has revolutionised AI by allowing models to self-improve with new data. The resulting technology is having a widespread impact on society. It is helping farmers spot disease outbreaks in the crops we eat, doctors spot cancers and other diseases in medical scans, and engineers stabilise power grids to better integrate intermittent renewable energies.

The three core pillars of modern machine learning

The seven winners have been instrumental in the development of three technologies described as the core pillars of modern machine learning.

Bengio, Hinton, Hopfield, and LeCun carried out groundbreaking research into the first pillar – the artificial neural networks that have become the dominant model for machine learning.

These neural networks are inspired by the human brain using processes that mimic how neurons connect, allowing them to identify patterns in unstructured data and draw conclusions from them. As well as helping a radiologist more accurately spot a bone fracture in an X-ray, or use historical data to alert a refinery engineer that a pump might soon fail, it has allowed firms like Google and ChatGPT to build chatbots that can assist users in everyday tasks by writing emails and summarising large tracts of text.
Huang and Dally were awarded for their work leading the development of the second pillar, the hardware that underpins the operation of machine learning algorithms – GPUs or graphics processing units.

Huang is founder and CEO of Nvidia and Dally its chief scientist. Last year, the boom in artificial intelligence propelled the chipmaker above Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company. However, its meteoric rise took a significant step back in January when Chinese developers launched a new AI app called DeepSeek that was built at a fraction of the cost of those from western rivals and uses earlier generation chips. Nvidia’s shares tumbled around 17%, knocking US$589bn off its valuation, on fears that the news would weaken demand for its high-end chips. The company also appears to be caught up in the escalating trade war between the US and China, with reports that regulators are reviving antitrust investigations into a host of US tech firms after US president Donald Trump put in place tariffs against Chinese imports.

Li is the final engineer awarded this year in recognition of her work on the third pillar: enabling the creation of high-quality datasets to benchmark progress in machine learning. Li created ImageNet, a large-scale image database that allows access to millions of labelled images that have proved crucial for training and evaluating computer vision algorithms.

Celebrations and concerns

Dame Lynn Gladden, chair of the QE Prize judging panel and a Fellow of IChemE, said: “This year’s winning innovation is a groundbreaking advancement that impacts everyone, yet the full extent of its underlying engineering remains largely unrecognised, making it an especially exciting choice.”

Hopfield, who is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, said: “It is my joy to be honoured with the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside six expert engineers who, like me, try to use facts about our brains to make more powerful computers.”

Hopfield and Hinton were awarded the physics Nobel Prize last year for their work on AI.

Hinton has been more circumspect about the balance of risks and rewards that AI offers society. He made headlines in 2023 after leaving Google and sharing his fears that “it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using [AI] for bad things”.

As with any technology, there are concerns about AI being unintentionally or maliciously used to cause harm, ranging from the spread of misinformation to the engineering of biological weapons. Of course, a key concern is that AI, like the other forms of automation that preceded it, will best human efficiency and reliability, leading to mass job losses.