Paper
AI Helping Science: The ‘Shape’ of Things to Come
When we started working with artificial intelligence (AI) more than a decade ago, people were skeptical about whether this technology would develop enough in the foreseeable future to do anything useful. But we held on to our faith in AI’s potential to benefit humanity. We used games like chess, Go and Atari to train and test our AI systems to become smarter and more capable. In 2016, we decided to use our smart systems to try to solve a 50-year-old fundamental problem in biology, called the protein-folding problem. This was the birth of AlphaFold, our AI system that predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins based on their amino acid sequence. In this article, you will learn about AlphaFold’s achievements, which demonstrate the power of AI to dramatically accelerate scientific discovery and benefit society.
Authors: Demis Hassabis · John Jumper