Nobel Prizes and AI: The Promise, the Peril, and the Path Forward

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2024-10-22 16:00:02

There is no Nobel Prize for computer science, but this year the Nobel Committee made three awards with deep ties to computing and innovation. Viewed together, the Nobel Committee may also be making a statement about the current state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the challenges ahead.

Demis Hassabis, a former chess prodigy and the founder of Google DeepMind, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work, along with John Jumper, on protein folding. Hassabis and Jumper constructed an AI model to predict the structure of virtually all 200 million proteins. As the Nobel Committee explained, “Researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.”[1]

Developing AI programs for chess loomed large in Hassabis’s work. At DeepMind, Hassabis revolutionized the world of game programming with the introduction of reinforcement learning algorithms using neural networks. Traditionally, chess programs relied on the expertise of Grandmasters. They would refine evaluation algorithms (now called “weights”) to select the best move among several options. With self-learning techniques, AlphaZero, developed by Hassabis, ignored the wisdom of the Grandmasters, assessed the rules of the game, and became the strongest computer program in the world after four hours of play.

AlphaFold2 followed from AlphaZero, built to understand the “building blocks of life,” the proteins found in every cell of the human body.