Congratulations to Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis who has just jointly won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on proteins.
We are delighted to highlight a significant achievement from one of this year’s brilliant keynote speakers on the intersection of artificial intelligence and scientific research. Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, has been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on protein folding. Hassabis’s pioneering contributions, particularly through DeepMind’s protein-folding AI model, AlphaFold, have made substantial strides in scientific discovery, offering new insights into complex biological processes.
If you didn’t catch Demis in action at MWC Barcelona 2024, you can re-watch his keynote session, Our AI Future, where he discusses AI and his work.
And finally we solved this problem – where we could predict in a few seconds, from the genetic sequence, the 3D structure of a protein. And because it’s so fast – it would normally take five years for one protein and there are 200 million proteins known to science - what would have taken a billion years to do, we have done in one year with AlphaFold.
Demis Hassibis, speaking at MWC Barcelona 2024
Hassabis, best-known for AlphaGo—the first AI to defeat a world champion at the game of Go—has led DeepMind to become a key player in AI research, with over 1,000 published research papers, including breakthrough studies featured in Nature and Science. His work in AI has not only pushed the boundaries of machine learning in gaming but also tackled real-world challenges. AlphaFold’s advancements have significantly accelerated research in fields like drug discovery, contributing to the understanding of protein structures, which are essential to numerous biological processes.
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At MWC Barcelona 2024, Hassabis joined Steven Levy, tech industry author, on the keynote mainstage to discuss how AI can continue to drive human progress. He delved into the responsible deployment of AI, DeepMind’s achievements across various domains, and the latest innovations, including Gemini, Google DeepMind’s most advanced AI model to date.
As we witness the rapid evolution of AI, Hassabis’s achievements serve as a reminder of the technology’s potential to address complex scientific questions and accelerate solutions to some of society's most pressing challenges. Congratulations Demis!