A data bottleneck is holding AI science back, says new Nobel winner
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The call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences woke him in the middle of the night. Or rather, his wife did. She answered the phone at their home in Washington, D.C. and screamed that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The prize is the ultimate recognition of his work as a biochemist at the University of Washington.
“I woke up at two [a.m.] and basically didn't sleep through the whole day, which was all parties and stuff,” he told me the day after the announcement. “I'm looking forward to getting back to normal a little bit today.”
Baker wasn’t alone in winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded it to Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, a director at the same company, too. Google DeepMind was awarded for its research on AlphaFold, a tool which can predict how proteins are structured, while Baker was recognized for his work using AI to design new proteins. Read more about it here.
Half the prize goes to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper from Google DeepMind for using AI to solve protein folding, and the other to David Baker for tools to help design new proteins.
