Demis Hassabis and John Jumper Win Nobel Prize for AlphaFold

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen a significant number of Nobel Prizes this past week.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners for 2024, with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Director John Jumper sharing one-half of the prize, with David Baker — who is head of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington — securing the other half.

The announcement comes the day after artificial intelligence (AI) pioneers John Hopfield and Geoff Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their seminal work on machine learning and AI.

Specifically, Baker’s award was for “computational protein design,” while Hassabis and Jumper’s went to “protein structure prediction.”

Protein fix

Since proteins are thought to be the fundamental units of life, DeepMind’s work on AlphaFold has been extremely groundbreaking. The Google subsidiary unveiled its AI model in 2020, despite years of speculation about its potential. It predicted the three-dimensional structure of proteins based solely on their genetic sequence, which went a long way toward resolving a long-standing scientific mystery.

The structure of a protein determines its function, and in the past, determining a protein’s structure required years of laboratory testing and was a slow, labor-intensive procedure. DeepMind was able to speed this up to just a few hours using AlphaFold, covering the majority of the 200 million proteins that exist. The implications of this are immense, since this type of information is essential for drug development, disease diagnosis, and bioengineering, among other things.

“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.”

On the other hand, Baker earned his share of the prize for creating completely new types of proteins that are computationally engineered to fulfill particular purposes in medications, vaccines, and other products.

Hassabis, a London native born in 1976, became a multi-talented prodigy at an early age, becoming a master chess player by the time he was a teenager. He worked as U’s lead programmer as well. G. He founded DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, whom Microsoft recruited from AI startup Inflection AI earlier this year. He previously worked as a video game developer for Bullfrog Productions and received a first-class honors degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge.

In 2014, Jumper joined DeepMind as a research scientist after Google paid more than $500 million to acquire the company. Furthermore, it’s important to note that Hassabis received a UK awarded a knighthood in March for “services to artificial intelligence.”

Apart from the immense honor of being bestowed with this distinction worldwide, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will receive a monetary reward of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million), of which David Baker will receive half and Hassabis and Jumper the remaining half.