World impact is not how Nobels are won. If that was the case Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg and others would all have multiple ones.

I honestly do not see this paper as being in the same magnitude of brilliance as a typical Nobel would be. Not to mention that it barely counts as science (actually it probably does not). Don't get me wrong. It is a huge achievement for both the machine learning research field and for humanity as a whole, but putting along the achievements of Nobel physicists and such feels wrong.

objectively speaking what makes them so much better?

What impact?

It's used in all sorts of models, like LLMs and image generators. It's probably the most popular foundation of advanced ML models today.

Right, but what is their "world impact"?

That of allowing people to generate, synthesize, and transform all major modalities of media, from text, to audio and video, for peanuts, instantly.

They create immense economic value and increase productivity.

It's deniable right now. Future looks bright for them, but impact _now_ is more smoke than actual effect.

On top of that, they face massive lawsuits for violating existing IP etc. It's far from a proven business model indeed (heck, OpenAI isn't even profitable yet), and even further as a technology (because it is so inherently unreliable - no matter the model size).

So atm they just sell hype, and not much more.

You mean a Turing Award...

Nobel is a vanity certificate. The author of that paper must have made more money than whatever the Nobel committee would have given to him.

Isn’t Nobel like $1M?