It's been a big week for the Nobel Prize in the world of artificial intelligence. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Director John Jumper sharing half of the award, with David and David, Director of the University's Institute for Protein Design, I ended up sharing it with Mr. Baker. Secure the other half of Washington.
The news comes a day after AI pioneers Jeff Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their fundamental research in machine learning and AI.
Hassabis and Jumper specifically won in the category of “protein structure prediction,'' while Baker won in the category of “computational protein design.''
protein fix
Proteins are the building blocks of life, which is why DeepMind's work with AlphaFold is so revolutionary. Its potential has been touted for years, but the Google subsidiary officially launched its AI model in 2020, predicting the 3D structure of a protein using only genetic sequence, giving scientists a long-awaited chance to learn more. Great progress has been made in resolving the problems that have been plaguing us. .
A protein's shape determines how it functions, and figuring out its shape has historically been a slow and labor-intensive process, often requiring years of laboratory experimentation. Using AlphaFold, DeepMind was able to accelerate this to just a few hours and cover most of the 200 million proteins in existence. This impact cannot be overstated, as this type of data is essential for drug discovery, disease diagnosis, bioengineering, and more.
“One of the discoveries recognized this year concerns the construction of amazing proteins,” Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement. “The other is realizing a 50-year-old dream of predicting protein structure from amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries offer vast possibilities.”
Baker secured half of the prize money for developing an entirely new class of proteins that are computationally designed to perform specific functions in medicines, vaccines, etc.
Born in London in 1976, Hassabis emerged as a prodigy in various fields from an early age, reaching the status of chess master by the time he was a teenager. He is also the lead programmer at British video game developer Bullfrog Productions, graduated with a first class honors in computer science from the University of Cambridge, and went on to found DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, whom Microsoft recruited from AI startup Inflection AI. I did. At the beginning of this year.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for more than $500 million, and Jumper joined as a researcher three years later. It is also worth noting here that Hassabis was awarded a British knighthood in March for his “contributions to artificial intelligence.”
In addition to the global prestige of winning such an award, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry carries a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), half of which goes to David Baker and the other half to Hassabis. Mr. and Mr. Jumper will distribute it.