I think a good analogue for this situation is that of the Nobel in Physics for the Blue LED. The first blue LED was built by Herb Maruska and Wally Rhines at S

I think a good analogue for this situation is that of the Nobel in Physics for the Blue LED. The first blue LED was built by Herb Maruska and Wally Rhines at Stanford in 1972. However it was incredibly dim. It took decades of focused and sustained research by Shuji Nakamura and others to make a commercially viable blue LED. Hence Nakamura won the Nobel Same deal with AI/ML. Although Nakamura was actually doing something PHYSICS related!