Breakthrough Prize Honors Six $3 Million Winners at Santa Monica Gala

Overview

• The Breakthrough Prize gala, held Saturday at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, marked the 12th edition of the so-called Oscars of Science.
• Organizers presented six awards worth $3 million each in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics, part of more than $15 million given this year.
• Laureates included researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton, Penn, Chicago, MIT, NYU, Columbia, Oxford, Duke, Caltech and UC Santa Barbara, with French mathematician Frank Merle among the honorees.
• The crowd mixed Hollywood and Silicon Valley, with Anne Hathaway, Robert Downey Jr., Margot Robbie and Ben Affleck joining Bill Gates, Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
• Altman said AI collaborations with prizewinning scientists are speeding discoveries and posing big societal questions, reflecting the event’s tech-backed roots under founders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Yuri and Julia Milner and Anne Wojcicki.