A British computer scientist who is at the forefront of the AI revolution has been awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry.
Sir Demis Hassabis, 48, who is the chief executive and co-founder of London-based artificial intelligence start-up Google DeepMind, received the honour from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for "breakthrough" work on proteins.
He received the honour alongside American John Jumper, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind.
The pair contributed to the development of an AI model which helped solve one of biology's biggest mysteries that has puzzled scientists for more than five decades: how do protein structures form?
They share the prize with David Baker, of the University of Washington, who pioneered the method for designing proteins.
In 2020,Sir Demis and Dr Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2.
With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries.
The hope is that knowing how proteins - the building blocks of life - work will help pave the way for development of novel drugs to treat diseases such as cancer, dementia and even Covid-19.
Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said: "One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins.
"The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.
"Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities."
Sir Demis is the second British-born scientist to win a Nobel this year, with Professor Geoffrey Hinton receiving the physics award on Tuesday for his work on AI.
He sent a congratulatory message on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday which said: "Massive congratulations to my good friend and former Google colleague geoffreyhinton on winning the Nobel Prize in Physics (with John Hopfield)!
"Incredibly well deserved, Geoff laid the foundations for the deep learning revolution that underpins the modern AI field."
Sir Demis was born in London in 1976 and received his PhD in from University College London.
A child chess prodigy, he designed and programmed a multimillion-selling game called Theme Park in his teens before going to Cambridge University.
He co-founded Google DeepMind, which specialises in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neuroscience research, in 2010.
He previously said Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to be “one of the biggest inventions humanity will ever make”, especially in the field of healthcare.
Speaking to Sir Tony Blair at the Tony Blair Institute’s Future of Britain conference in London, he said that over the next decade AI would transform work and productivity through digital assistants, but the technology will also help “accelerate scientific discovery” with “huge implications in drug discovery and disease understanding”.
Sir Demis said: “If we could replicate that and make intelligence an abundant tool, it would be unbelievably transformative - there’d be almost nothing that you couldn’t use that for if you built that in a general way.
“So to me, it’s been obvious for many, many years that if AI could – if it was possible and it seems that it is – (reach) this general kind of human-level AI we sometimes call artificial general intelligence, it would transform everything.
“So it will be at least as big as the Industrial Revolution, possibly bigger, more like the advent of electricity or even fire.
“I think it has the potential to be one of the biggest inventions humanity will ever make.”
Sir Demis said AI systems in the NHS could help clinical staff take better advantage of the vast amounts of data they have access to.
He explained that AI could “triage” data consumption and allow “the experts, whether they’re doctors or nurses, to focus on what they do best”.
