Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry!
The only commonality between Chess and Chemistry is the first three letters of those words, but this year’s Nobel Prize has contributed even more to the meaning and established a deeper connection. By now, you should, as a chess player, already know that Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind (later acquired by Google), along with John M. Jumper, has received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Together, they solved a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins. To be more specific:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024
with one half to
David Baker
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA“for computational protein design”
and the other half jointly to
Demis Hassabis
Google DeepMind, London, UKJohn M. Jumper
Google DeepMind, London, UK“for protein structure prediction”
They cracked the code for proteins’ amazing structures!
In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
Sir Demis Hassabis, born on July 27, 1976, is not only a leading computer scientist and AI researcher but also an accomplished chess player. He began playing chess at the age of four and credits his early experiences with the game as foundational to his interest in artificial intelligence. "That's what got me into AI in the first place: playing chess from a young age and trying to improve my own thought processes," he remarked. At the bright age of 13, he was the second highest-rated youth in his category, rated 2300 FIDE, second only to the legendary Judit Polgar!
Hassabis founded DeepMind in 2010. Since then, its mission has been to "solve intelligence" and then use that intelligence "to solve everything else." More concretely, DeepMind aims to combine insights from systems neuroscience with new developments in machine learning and computing hardware to unlock increasingly powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that will work towards the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
DeepMind created AlphaGo, a program that defeated world champion Lee Sedol at the complex game of Go. Go had been considered the holy grail of AI due to its high number of possible board positions and resistance to existing programming techniques.
From one problem to another, Hassabis is committed to solving them, and he’s not stopping!
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