This year's Nobel Prize was rounded by AI bosses.
Just now, the Royal Sweden Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David ·Baker "for his contributions to computational protein design"; The other half was awarded to Demis· Demis Hassabis and John· John M. Jumper, M· "in recognition of their achievements in protein structure prediction."
David Baker was born October 6, 1962, an United States biochemist and computational biologist. Known as a "pioneer" in the field of protein design, he proposed methods to predict and design the three-dimensional structure of proteins before DeepMind. The method he pioneered in designing proteins and predicting their three-dimensional structures helps scientists understand their functions by accurately predicting their spatial structure, and designing more effective drug molecules or engineering enzymes to improve their catalytic efficiency, which has important application value in drug design, enzyme engineering and other fields. In addition to this, he has co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies and was named to Time magazine's inaugural list of 100 most influential people in health in 2024.
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who won the award, are both Google employees. Among them, Demis Hassabis is the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, born on July 27, 1976 in the United Kingdom, computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher. Hassabis is a former video game AI programmer and designer, as well as a board game expert. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of United Kingdom and has received many prestigious awards for his work on AlphaFold, including the Breakthrough Award, the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award. In 2017, he was named CBE and was named to Time Magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People.
John Jumper, on the other hand, is a senior research scientist at Google, where he is involved in protein structure prediction. Prior to joining DeepMind, Jumper worked at D.E. Shaw Research on protein dynamics and molecular dynamics simulations of ultra-cold liquids. After coming to DeepMind, he led the development of AlphaFold, a system recognized in 2020 as solving a 50-year-old scientific puzzle and has been used to predict the structure of more than 200 million proteins. They have also built the AlphaFold protein structure database, giving researchers around the world free access to these predictions.
AlphaFold, the award-winning protein prediction project that led to AI bigwigs, explained it in a related paper as: "An innovative computing method", which is actually a combination of biological and physical knowledge, by analyzing the relationship between amino acid sequences and their three-dimensional structures, using neural networks to make predictions. Protein structure is critical to understanding its function, yet the currently known protein structure accounts for only a tiny fraction of known protein sequences. Traditional experimental methods are time-consuming and inefficient, so accurate computational methods are needed to fill this gap.
AlphaFold is the first computational method capable of predicting protein structure with near-experimental precision in most cases. This model performed well in the 14th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14) with a backbone accuracy of 0.96 Å, significantly outperforming other methods. Ultimately, AlphaFold's performance in CASP14 demonstrated its high accuracy, and its predictions were validated in multiple newly submitted PDB structures.
By the way, Baker's RFDiffusion has only been out for a year, and this time the award time is much faster than the ICML Time Check Award, which is the fastest Nobel Prize...
Netizens are hotly discussed
With the addition of yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics, artificial intelligence has already won two Nobel Prizes! There was a real uproar on Twitter.
While congratulating, netizens did not forget to ridicule, so simply send the literary award to ChatGPT.
Some netizens ridiculed that the hype of artificial intelligence is now all about chemistry.
Some netizens also seriously discussed, will the development of artificial intelligence take a back seat to the understanding of scientific foundations and theories?
A netizen expressed his understanding, thinking that the award for chemistry is much more appropriate than the physics prize, and it does sound much more reliable to use artificial intelligence to study proteins.
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