30 December

This is Demis Hassabis. I don't think we realise that we're living in a time where the greatest revolution of all time is unfolding right in front of us. That revolution is AI, and Demis is at the centre of it. He heads up Google's DeepMind, and pioneered much modern AI work. You'll find lots of people throwing cheap shots at AI, as the status quo always does in the face of change. But here's an indication of the revolution it's bringing. Demis was determined to solve an old 'impossible' problem in biology, the protein folding problem. How to predict the shape of a protein from its constituent amino acids. Nobody had ever cracked it, nobody had come close. Proteins are the root of life and also of research in biology, including in drugs and disease. Demis, with his team at Google, created AlphaFold. An AI system to predict protein folding. They did it, cracked the impossible. The system can predict every known protein, over 200 million of them. And can predict brand new ones too, and their links to other things like DNA and RNA. They released all of them, for free, to the scientific community. The gigantic leap this will lead to in science is staggering. Demis won a Nobel Prize for this work, in 2024. AI isn't a performing monkey, or a plagiarist. No human can do this.