Prior to this remarkable achievement, many VinFuture Prize laureates have continued to be honored with the prestigious Nobel Prize, demonstrating the VinFuture Prize’s ability to identify and honor contributions with profound global impact, on par with the world’s most established scientific awards.
From left: Prof. Yoshua Bengio, Mr. Jensen Huang and Prof. Yann LeCun are three of the seven scientists honored with the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Previously, they were awarded the 2024 VinFuture Grand Prize, along with Prof. Geoffrey E. Hinton and Prof. Fei-Fei Li. Photo: VinFuture.
The 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering celebrates seven innovators—Prof. Yoshua Bengio, Prof. Geoffrey E. Hinton, Prof. John Hopfield, Prof. Yann LeCun, Mr. Jensen Huang, Dr. Bill Dally, and Prof. Fei-Fei Li— for their groundbreaking contributions to modern machine learning, a cornerstone of artificial intelligence advancements, according to the prize’s official announcement. The group of esteemed scientists will share the £500,000 Prize for their revolutionary breakthroughs.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation stated that this year’s award recognizes the collective contributions of innovators instrumental in advancing the three core pillars of modern machine learning: advanced algorithms, high-performance hardware, and high-quality datasets.
This comprehensive recognition aligns with the VinFuture Prize Council’s decision to award the $3 million Grand Prize to the five leading AI scientists in December 2024. Professors Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun were honored for their pivotal development of artificial neural networks and deep learning algorithms. Furthermore, computing performance has seen rapid advancement due to Mr. Jensen Huang’s innovations in the use of graphics processing units (GPUs). Prof. Fei-Fei Li’s creation of the ImageNet dataset has been instrumental in the progress of image recognition systems, becoming indispensable for training deep learning models on a large scale.
The VinFuture Prize distinguishes itself from most international awards by not only honoring remarkable scientists but also recognizing and celebrating pioneers who apply scientific discoveries to benefit humanity. As the first major international science and technology award to jointly recognize both an industry pioneer, Mr. Jensen Huang, and a leading academic, Professor Fei-Fei Li, VinFuture Prize demonstrates its broad vision and commitment to the evolving landscape of modern science and technology, where impactful achievements arise from the synergy of academic research and practical application.
Prof. Richard Henry Friend, Chair of the VinFuture Prize Council, affirmed that this aligns perfectly with VinFuture’s mission: to comprehensively recognize contributions from all facets of the science and technology ecosystem. Breakthrough innovations often arise at the intersection of academic research and industrial development; only through collaboration between these spheres can truly meaningful advancements for humanity be achieved.
VinFuture Prize’s vision and mission are increasingly reaffirmed within the global science and technology community, as evidenced by the continued recognition of VinFuture laureates with prestigious international awards, most notably the Nobel Prize. In 2023, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Katalin Karikó and Prof. Drew Weissman (USA), Co-Laureates of the 2021 VinFuture Grand Prize, for their pioneering research on mRNA nucleoside modifications, enabling the development of effective COVID-19 vaccines.
In 2024, Dr. Demis Hassabis (United Kingdom) and Dr. John Jumper (USA), Co-Laureates of the 2022 VinFuture Special Prize for Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields – were honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 for developing an AI model that predicts protein structures. Later that year, Prof. Geoffrey E. Hinton was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. According to Prof. Friend, these are the testament to VinFuture Prize’s ability to identify impactful scientific works within just over four years of operation.
