By Martin Coulter
LONDON (Reuters) – The award this week of Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics to a small number of artificial intelligence pioneers affiliated with Google has stirred debate over the company’s research dominance and how breakthroughs in computer science ought to be recognised.
Google has been at the forefront of AI research, but has been forced on the defensive as it tackles competitive pressure from Microsoft-backed OpenAI and mounting regulatory scrutiny from the U.S Department of Justice.
On Wednesday, Demis Hassabis – co-founder of Google’s AI unit DeepMind – and colleague John Jumper were awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry, alongside U.S. biochemist David Baker, for their work decoding the structures of microscopic proteins.
Former Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, won the Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday, alongside U.S. scientist John Hopfield, for earlier discoveries in machine learning that paved the way for the AI boom.
Professor Dame Wendy …