But for Demis Hassabis, it was in fact only the outline of his real project, AlphaFold. This is also what earned him the Nobel, which he shares with his colleague John Jumper. The two men together run the company Deep Mind, earning Demis Hassabis the nickname “the smartest CEO in the world.” Their company was bought in 2014 by Google for half a billion euros and is now one of its subsidiaries.
According to the Nobel jury, this AlphaFold program has already “a gigantic impact” and “spectacular results”. And its potential is just as “huge“. In practice, this artificial intelligence is capable of predicting the structure of almost all proteins known to science… or 200 million. Since 2020 and version 2 of AlphaFold, two million researchers have already used it in 190 countries .
In a second instead of months
Concretely, proteins are large molecules responsible for the chemical reactions at the basis of life, and made up of amino acids, also known as the “building blocks of life”. It is from this amino acid sequence that AlphaFold predicts the 3D structure of a protein. Its function also depends on this structure. “We could determine this structure in the laboratory, but it would take months of manipulation. With AlphaFold, it takes less than a second! And with a precision high enough to be usable by biologists, for example for drug discovery or understand how a cell works“, illustrates Gilles Louppe (ULiège), specialist in AI applied to scientific research and who on Tuesday predicted a quick Nobel Prize for the AlphaFold team.
Demis Hassabis, who was indeed among the favorites despite his very recent invention, however said he “stunned” to the news. “I was blank for a few minutes“, he confided, adding that his work “had been a real challenge for computational biology”. A feat, according to Nobel, which “fulfills a scientific dream of fifty years“.
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