At this year’s Google I/O, company CEO Sundar Pichai welcomed “for the first time on stage”, Sir Demis Hassabis. While he might not have been a well-known name until Google Brain and AI startup DeepMind that the company acquired in 2014 were clubbed together, his work has spoken for him. The CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, the new AI unit at the Search giant, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work on AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence system that revolutionised protein structure prediction.
What is AlphaFold and why is it important
Hassabis has been awarded the Nobel for AlphaFold – an AI system that is seen to have a transformative impact on the field of structural biology. Developed by Google DeepMind, it predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence, a significant breakthrough in biology, as the 3D structure of a protein determines its function.
Understanding protein structure is crucial for a wide range of applications, including drug discovery, disease understanding, and the development of new biomaterials. Since its public release in 2021, AlphaFold has predicted the structures of nearly all known proteins, creating a vast database of over 200 million protein structures.
How Hassabis reached this level
Demis Hassabis’s journey to the Nobel Prize is a testament to the power of combining diverse passions Born in London in 1976, he first made waves as a chess prodigy, achieving master status at just 13. This early fascination with strategy and learning laid the groundwork for his future in AI.
After graduating with top honours in computer science from Cambridge University, he even launched a video game company. He pursued a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, seeking to understand the intricacies of the human brain. This knowledge ultimately led him to co-found DeepMind, an AI startup that would revolutionise the field.
His contributions were recognised with a knighthood in 2023, and now, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Throughout his career, Hassabis has emphasised the link between games and AI, seeing them as a gateway to understanding how machines learn.
His early love for chess, particularly chess computers, sparked ideas that would later shape his pioneering work. DeepMind’s AI systems, capable of beating humans in complex games like Go, chess, and Starcraft II, are a testament to his vision.