10/09/2024
Advances in artificial intelligence are at an all-time high, and the technology has helped lead to Nobel Prizes in two major disciplines. After announcing that the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to computer science pioneer Geoffrey E. Hinton for developing a specialized neural network, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded, in part, to DeepMind AI, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, director of Google's DeepMind, shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (one-quarter each) for creating an AI model to solve a problem that had been plaguing chemists for 50 years. Hassabis and Jumper co-led a team that developed a specialized neural network called AlphaFold. The team, co-led by Hassabis and Jumper, developed a deep learning algorithm called AlphaFold. Hassabis and Jumper co-led a team that developed a deep-learning algorithm called AlphaFold, which uses small sequences of compounds, especially amino acids, to predict the 3D structure of proteins.
The other half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to David Baker, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, for his work on protein design using computational systems. deepMind's Hassabis and Jumper will share about $1 million with Baker.
