Winning the
@NobelPrize is the honour of a lifetime and the realisation of a lifelong dream - it still hasn’t really sunk in yet.
With AlphaFold2 we cracked the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction: predicting the 3D structure of a protein purely from its amino acid sequence. Proteins are the building blocks of life, and knowing the structure of a protein is crucial for understanding the function it performs.
We then folded all 200 million proteins known to science and made those structures freely available for anyone in the world to use, with the help of our wonderful collaborators at
@emblebi. Over 2 million researchers have already used AlphaFold2 and its predictions to advance a huge range of important work - everything from enzyme design, to disease understanding, to drug discovery.
But this is only the beginning. Over the next few years AI will help us make great strides towards developing new and more effective therapies for today's most prevalent diseases, and the fantastic team at
@IsomorphicLabs are making rapid progress on this mission. I can’t think of a more important or beneficial use of AI.
Then of course there is advancing AGI itself, the original and enduring goal, and the vision behind the founding of DeepMind nearly 15 years ago. If AI is built safely and responsibly, I believe it will be one of the most transformative and beneficial technologies ever. I’ve always thought of AI as the ultimate tool to help us accelerate scientific discovery.
Congratulations to John Jumper (and David Baker!), the amazing AlphaFold team, and all our incredible colleagues at
@GoogleDeepMind and
@Google that supported and encouraged us along the way - this award is for all of us! It’s been such an honour and privilege to work with all of you to advance the frontiers of AI and science, and there is so much more to come!
BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024
#NobelPrize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”