Google DeepMind CEO wins joint Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on AlphaFold

• DeepMind researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have won a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
• The pair were recognized for their work on protein structure prediction.
• In 2020, DeepMind developed an AI tool to predict protein structures called AlphaFold2.

Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of DeepMind, is one of three researchers to be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Biochemist David Baker received half of the prize “for computational protein design,” while Hassabis and fellow DeepMinder John Jumper shared the other half for their work on protein structure prediction.

The pair were recognized for their use of AI to predict protein structures with the DeepMind tool AlphaFold2.

The committee praised the recipients for cracking “the code for proteins’ amazing structures,” highlighting Hassabis and Jumper’s achievement of developing “an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.”

“One of the discoveries being recognized 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,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement.

DeepMind released the first iteration of AlphaFold in 2020.

Since then, the tool has helped to predict the structure of nearly all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. In 2022, DeepMind also unveiled free-to-access models of microscopic protein structures.

The company says more than 2 million people across 190 countries have used the AlphaFold tool since its release.

Representatives for Google DeepMind did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman cofounded DeepMind in London in November 2010.

Google acquired the startup for $400 million in 2014 and later merged it with Google AI’s division, Google Brain, to become Google DeepMind in April 2023.