Google DeepMind scientists win Nobel Prize for chemistry

The Nobel Prize successful Chemistry was awarded to 3 scientists contiguous — 2 of which are important figures astatine Google DeepMind — for their enactment astir proteins, which the Nobel Prize committee describes arsenic the “chemical tools of life.” 

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and elder DeepMind probe idiosyncratic John Jumper received the grant for creating the open-source AlphaFold2 AI exemplary to cipher the operation of quality proteins. “With its help, they person been capable to foretell the operation of virtually each the 200 cardinal proteins that researchers person identified,” the Nobel committee astatine the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said successful its announcement.

David Baker, who shares the prize with Hassabis and Jumper, was awarded for “computational macromolecule design.” The Nobel Committee noted that Baker had successfully designed a caller macromolecule successful 2003 that was “unlike immoderate other,” and has since developed caller proteins for pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials, and tiny sensors implicit the past 2 decades.

“One of the discoveries being recognised this twelvemonth concerns the operation of spectacular proteins. The different is astir fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting macromolecule structures from their amino acerb sequences,” said Nobel Chemistry Committee seat Heiner Linke. “Both of these discoveries unfastened up immense possibilities.” 

The technological applications for AlphaFold2 see helping researchers to recognize antibiotic absorption and make integrative degrading enzymes, according to the Nobel Committee. “Work that erstwhile took years present takes conscionable a fewer minutes acknowledgment to this year’s chemistry laureates,” the Nobel committee said on X.

The improvement of artificial quality exertion has played a notable relation successful this year’s lineup, with the Nobel Prize for Physics being awarded yesterday to 2 scientists credited for gathering the “foundation” for AI. That announcement has already attracted criticism from immoderate physicists who consciousness the grant was miscategorized — a sentiment echoed by Geoffrey Hinton, 1 of the Physics awardees who is known arsenic a “Godfather of AI.”

“If determination was a Nobel Prize for machine science, our enactment would intelligibly beryllium much due for that,” Hinton said successful a post-award interrogation with The New York Times. “But determination isn’t one.” When commended for his remark by the Times, Hinton added that it was “also a hint.”