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It has been a big week for Nobel Prizes in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners for 2024, with DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis and DeepMind Director John Jumper sharing one-half of the prize, alongside David Baker who is head of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington.
The news comes the day after AI pioneers Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational work in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Hassabis and Jumper won the award, specifically, for “protein structure prediction,” while Baker’s was for “computational protein design.”
We’ve all heard that proteins are the building blocks of life, which is why DeepMind’s work on AlphaFold has been so revolutionary. Though its potential had been touted for years, Google-subsidiary formally presented the AI model back in 2020, and went much of the way toward solving a problem that had stumped scientists for years by predicting the 3D structure of proteins using nothing more than their genetic sequence.
The shape of a protein dictates how it works, and figuring out its shape was historically a slow, labor-intensive process that would often require years of lab experiments. With AlphaFold, DeepMind was able to accelerate this to mere hours, covering most of the 200 million proteins in existence. The ramifications of this can’t be understated, as this kind of data is vital to things like drug discovery, diagnosing diseases, and bioengineering.
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement. “The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities.”
It’s worth noting that Hassabis was also awarded a U.K. knighthood for ‘services to artificial intelligence’ back in March.
In addition to the global prestige of winning such an award, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry also comes with a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), with half of that going to David Baker and the other split between Hassabis and Jumper.
