I wanted to finally apply the AI to real-world domains. I was talking to Dave Silver, the project lead on AlphaGo, and we were discussing “What’s the next big project that DeepMind should do?” I was feeling like it was time to tackle something really hard in science because we had just solved more or less the pinnacle of games AI. We pretty much started the project roughly the day after we came back from the AlphaGo match in Seoul, where we beat Lee Sedol, the world champion. Why did you decide to create Alpha-Fold, and how did you get to the point where it can now fold practically every known protein? Scientific American spoke with Hassabis about developing AlphaFold, some of its most exciting potential applications and the ethical considerations of highly sophisticated AI. DeepMind has made the structures of proteins from nearly every species for which amino acid sequences exist freely available in a public database. But the goal was always to develop AI that could tackle important problems in science, Hassabis says.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior staff research scientist John Jumper were jointly awarded one of this year’s $3-million Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences for the achievement, which opens the door for applications that range from expanding our understanding of basic molecular biology to accelerating drug development.ĭeepMind developed AlphaFold soon after its AlphaGo AI made headlines in 2016 by beating world Go champion Lee Sedol at the game. Figuring out a single protein’s structure, or solving the “protein-folding problem,” can take years of finicky experiments.īut last year an artificial-intelligence program called AlphaFold, developed by the Alphabet-owned company DeepMind, predicted the 3-D structures of almost every known protein-about 200 million in all. But this is no easy feat: protein molecules consist of long, twisty chains of up to thousands of amino acids, chemical compounds that can interact with one another in many ways to take on an enormous number of possible three-dimensional shapes. To understand the function of the myriad proteins that perform vital jobs in a healthy body-or malfunction in a diseased one-scientists have to first determine these proteins’ molecular structure. There’s an age-old adage in biology: structure determines function.

Dead space brute model