It has been a big week for Nobel Prizes in the world of artificial intelligence. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today 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 news comes a day after AI pioneers Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational work in machine learning and AI.
Hassabis and Jumper won the award, specifically, for “protein structure prediction,” while Baker’s was for “computational protein design.”
Protein fix
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, the Google subsidiary formally presented the AI model 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 overstated, 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.”
Baker, for his part, secured his half of the prize for engineering entirely new kinds of proteins, designed computationally to perform specific functions within pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and so on.
Born in London in 1976, Hassabis emerged as a prodigy in a number of disciplines from a young age, reaching master status at chess by the time he was a teenager. He was also lead programmer at U.K. video game developer Bullfrog Productions, and he graduated from the University of Cambridge with first-class honors in Computer Science before going on to establish DeepMind alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, who Microsoft hired from AI startup Inflection AI earlier this year.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for more than $500 million, with Jumper joining as research scientist three years later. It’s also worth noting here that Hassabis was 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 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.