The Nobel Prize ceremony continues in Stockholm. The Royal Academy of Sciences has just awarded the prize in physics and chemistry. The scientists who won the most famous medals all have a more or less direct link with artificial intelligence.
AI is a hot topic and the scientific world is trying to tame it to its advantage. If the physics prize honors two of the “fathers” of artificial intelligence, the relationship between this new technology and the chemistry prize is more tenuous.
Indeed, researchers Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker were rewarded for their work on proteins. According to the committee these findings “offer enormous potential” to better understand the world around us and help the world of research, particularly medical.
But the prices of Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are also those of Google, and of its artificial intelligence DeepMind. In its press release, the jury is not mistaken and underlines the importance of AI in this work. The British tandem succeeded in developing a formula predicting the structure of a protein. A colossal job, largely carried out by an AI.
The victory of AI
The recognition of the two British scientists is a symbol of the growing importance of AI in the world of research. In 2020, the two researchers developed a model, called AlphaFold2. It is capable of determining the structure of a protein in advance.
Literature, economics and the Nobel Peace Prize
The rest of the Nobel Prizes will be awarded this week. The Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded this Thursday, while the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday. We will have to wait until Monday October 14 to complete the list of 2024 laureates with the Nobel Prize in Economics.
In addition to the title and all the opportunities it brings, the Nobel Prize rewards the winners with a check for eleven million Swedish crowns (980,000 euros). In the event of multiple winners, as is the case in physics and chemistry, the envelope is shared equally.
A controversial price
The Nobel Prize has been awarded from Stockholm in Sweden (Oslo in Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize) since 1901 by the committee of the same name. This award salutes the work of those who work for the “well-being of humanity” as desired by the founder of the event, the inventor Alfred Nobel.
This year again, the Nobel committee was criticized for its lack of equality and diversity. Of the three scientific subjects rewarded (medicine, physics and chemistry) no woman is among the winners. Since 1901, only 6 of them have won the medal in chemistry, including three French (Marie Curie in 1911, Irène Curie in 1935 and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2020).
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