Google DeepMind scientists win Nobel Prize for AlphaFold AI project

Just when they thought they had been passed over for this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, two scientists from Google's DeepMind AI research team got the call – just minutes before they were announced as winners.

Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google's DeepMind, and John Jumper, the project's American director, shared the prize for their work on AlphaFold2, an AI model that can predict protein structures. The two were honored along with David Baker, a University of Washington scientist who uses amino acids and computing power to create new types of proteins.

Hassabis and Jumper both said they received a message from the Swedish prize organization shortly before the news was published; Emergency calls and text messages eventually reached Hassabis' wife and another member of the DeepMind team. “We received the call very late. We assumed it didn't happen,” Hassabis said in a press conference Google held after Wednesday's announcement. “I tried to sleep it off,” Jumper added. “I couldn’t sleep last night.”

The AlphaFold project was first introduced in 2020 and has since predicted the structure of 200 million proteins identified by researchers. AlphaFold2, for which Hassabis and Jumper won the award, has been used by more than 2 million people in 190 countries. In the press conference, the two said that a version in the works, AlphaFold3, will be made available to the scientific community for free.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded a day earlier, also recognized groundbreaking work in AI that revealed “an entirely new way for us to use computers.” Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto and John Hopfield of Princeton University shared the prize for using physics to train neural networks – systems inspired by the way the human brain works – enabling machine learning, much of it what drives artificial intelligence.

Known as the “Godfather of AI,” Hinton worked at Google for a time but left the company in 2023, saying he was concerned about the risks posed by artificial intelligence. On Tuesday he pointed out both the positive effects, such as advances in healthcare, and the negative and almost unknowable aspects of the rapid development of AI. “We have no experience of what it’s like to have things that are smarter than us,” he said, as reported by The New York Times.

“AI as the ultimate tool”

The Nobel Committee called AlphaFold2 a “stunning breakthrough.” In the press conference, Hassabis and Jumper acknowledged that their work is just the beginning of AI-powered technology that could accelerate the development of medical treatments by years to months and help researchers understand what Hassabis called “fundamental mechanisms in… of biology”.

“I see AI as potentially the ultimate tool for accelerating science and scientific knowledge,” Hassabis said.

Hassabis and Jumper will share the 11 million Swedish kronor (approximately $1.06 million) prize with Baker.

The pair acknowledged the team at Google and many other scientists who did the groundwork on which their research was built. “It's humiliating. “Every time we train AI, every data point is the years of effort from someone who is training to be a doctoral student or has already earned their doctorate,” Jumper said. “It’s wonderful to see the work the scientific community has done around AlphaFold every day, and I can’t wait to see the next breakthroughs.”

While AI was an integral part of AlphaFold and was instrumental in identifying patterns that humans couldn't find, Hassabis pointed out that a lot of human work went into the project. “It wasn't just 'AI did this,'” he said. “It was an iterative process. We developed, we researched, we tried to find the right combinations between what the community understands about proteins and how we integrate those intuitions into our architecture.”

“AI was the toolbox that enabled us to do this incredible work,” said Hassabis