Nobel laureates said artificial intelligence will ultimately solve many of the hardest problems facing humanity, even as debate grows over the pace of AI development following incidents such as autonomous hacking. They also expect a stream of cases in which AI opens up unexplored fields or directly overturns theories long taken for granted. On Korea, they said the country is one of those that handles AI well and has ample potential to produce a Nobel laureate in the sciences.
"If AI makes a revolutionary discovery, like a breakthrough drug, and frees humanity from suffering, that is a victory for both humanity and AI," Craig Mello, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, said in a joint interview on the 20th during the Nobel Prize Dialogue Seoul 2026, held at COEX in Seoul's Gangnam district. "I am hopeful that AI will go on to make new discoveries that have an enormous impact on the world."
Mello, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, added that "even if AI made the discovery, a Nobel Prize could honor it if it has a tremendously real impact on the world." His assessment is that research led by AI can also win a Nobel Prize depending on its impact, and that this would not undermine the prize's authority.
The scientists at the interview said AI is sharply accelerating the pace of research. Brian Schmidt, a professor at the Australian National University who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, said, "We are using AI to identify asteroids that could pass close to Earth's surface from petabytes of sky images captured by space telescopes." He added, "In the future, we will be able to give quick warning that a certain asteroid could strike a major city such as Seoul." He also said, "Even Einstein's theory of relativity is not absolute," adding, "I hope AI helps solve the problem of quantum gravity, which is now considered one of the hardest challenges."
David MacMillan, a professor at Princeton University who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said, "This new tool, AI, lets scientists work in ways that were not possible before." He added, "What matters is that creative scientists who understand AI's value use it in ways that could not be done before."
On that point, they said there is ample chance a Nobel laureate will emerge from Korea's scientific community. Mello said, "Korea has many capable people and is an important country that can move ahead through AI research," predicting that "AI will bring countless undiscovered mysteries squarely into view." MacMillan said, "Korea's chemistry community has produced molecular synthesis research that shifts the existing paradigm," and added, "It could take decades, but there is ample potential for a Nobel Prize."
Views diverged somewhat on whether education needs to change in the age of AI. Mello said, "I hear that students in Korean schools are barred from using AI to write, and that is not desirable," adding, "Going forward, students who interact well with AI will thrive." He continued, "Rather than limiting students' creativity, AI will draw out their inherent creativity even more." Schmidt, by contrast, said, "I do not think education needs to change fundamentally in how students learn physics, chemistry and biology," judging that "you need sufficient mastery of basic knowledge to hold control over AI." MacMillan stressed, "We need to think about how far we can outsource knowledge to AI," saying, "What matters is teaching critical thinking skills in an academic field."
With the Nobel Prize announcements due in early October this year, interest is growing in whether research using AI will be among the winners. Rapidly advancing AI technology is taking on one unexplored scientific frontier after another, with OpenAI claiming that its AI model solved a mathematical problem that had gone unsolved for more than 90 years in just 88 hours. In 2024, Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto and a leading authority on machine learning, and John Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, were selected as the first Nobel laureates in an AI-related field. That same year, Demis Hassabis, then chief executive of Google DeepMind, John Jumper, then a senior research scientist at DeepMind, and David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AI-based research on protein structures.
On this point, the Nobel Foundation and the prize committee declared that there will be no change in the principles for selecting laureates. Hanna Stjaerne, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, said in an interview that day, "The principle of the Nobel Prize is that the achievement must have brought benefit to humanity," adding, "We will continue to uphold that." Eva Olsson, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and a member of the Nobel Prize in Physics committee, also stressed, "We focus on first identifying the invention and the innovation, and on who carried out the original work," adding, "The rise of AI will not change how we single out laureates."
The Nobel Prize Dialogue is an overseas special edition of the Nobel Week Dialogue, an academic event held in Sweden around Dec. 10 each year, when the Nobel Prize ceremony takes place. This is the third time it has been held in Korea, after 2017 and 2023. Sixteen experts from fields including science and technology, the arts and philosophy took part as speakers or panelists, engaging with an audience of about 1,200.
