Black and White’s AI programmer just won a Nobel prize: ‘an incredible honor, it’s the big one really’ [Video]

Professor Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind who began his programming career working for Bullfrog and Lionhead, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, alongside Professor John Jumper and Professor David Baker. Hassabis and Jumper’s share of the award is for their “complete revolution” in the prediction of protein structures through the AI tool AlphaFold2. 

AlphaFold first became available to researchers in 2018, and 2020’s AlphaFold2 is the second iteration (the third, AlphaFold3, was announced in May this year). It is an AI dedicated to predicting protein structures, created by DeepMind, which has now been used to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, a feat unimaginable a mere decade ago, as well as create new proteins by David Baker and his researchers.

Per the Nobel citation, Professor Baker receives half of the Nobel “for computational protein design”, while the other half is shared jointly between Professor Hassabis and …