What is DeepMind, the Google division that won a Nobel Prize?

“Combining all this talent into a focused team, backed by Google’s computing resources, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, when announcing the merger.

Demis Hassabis, who in addition to being this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is also a co-founder of DeepMind, noted last year that the new unit “will create the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs.”

Why did DeepMind scientists win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

Baker, a 62-year-old biochemist, won half of the award for his advances in “computational protein design,” while Hassabis and Jumper shared the other half for “the prediction of protein structures,” the study said. award jury.

Baker “accomplished the almost impossible feat of constructing completely new proteins,” the jury explained. “Among a multitude of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and image enzymes that can break down plastic,” he added.

“Our new AI methods are much more powerful” than traditional ones, explained the researcher about AphaFold, which is capable of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid. “With the help of this AI, they managed to predict the structure of almost all of the 200 million proteins identified by the researchers,” the jury said.

This process is key to “understanding how life works,” commented Heiner Linke, president of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. However, the main feature of AlphaFold is its ability to carry out these tasks at speeds never seen before.

“What took us months and years, AlphaFold was able to do in a weekend,” said Professor John McGeehan, former director of the US Center for Enzyme Innovation, regarding research on protein structure prediction.

In addition to that utility, this tool can also be used in other important areas of humanity, such as managing plastic pollution or even supporting not to lose large amounts of crops around the world.

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This point of AI barely scratches the surface

Hassabis is aware of the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the world. For this reason, in February of this year, during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, ​​he declared that “we are only scratching the surface of what is going to come in the coming years” in terms of technology and AI applications.

The scientist anticipated that in the next two years we will begin to see clinical trials of medicines generated by AI, which will also be able to minimize side effects.

He also highlighted that within a decade, intelligent systems could no longer need human scientists to pose hypotheses, as they will have the ability to formulate their own conjectures and problems to solve.