The decision from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences woke him in the course of the night. Or somewhat, his wife did. She answered the phone at their home in Washington, D.C. and screamed that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The prize is the final word recognition of his work as a biochemist on the University of Washington.
“I woke up at two [a.m.] and principally didn’t sleep through the entire day, which was all parties and stuff,” he told me the day after the announcement. “I’m looking forward to getting back to normal a bit bit today.”
Last week was a significant milestone for AI, with two Nobel prizes awarded for AI-related discoveries.
Baker wasn’t alone in winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded it to Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, a director at the identical company, too. Google DeepMind was awarded for its research on AlphaFold, a tool which may predict how proteins are structured, while Baker was recognized for his work using AI to design recent proteins. Read more about it here.
Meanwhile, the physics prize went to Geoffrey Hinton, a pc scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s underpins all of essentially the most powerful AI models on the earth today, and fellow computer scientist John Hopfield, who invented a variety of pattern-matching neural network that may store and reconstruct data. Read more about it here.
Talking to reporters after the prize was announced, Hassabis said he believes that it should herald more AI tools getting used for significant scientific discoveries.
But there may be one problem. AI needs masses of high-quality data to be useful for science, and databases containing that kind of information are rare, says Baker.
The prize is a recognition for the entire community of individuals working as protein designers. It should help move protein design from the “lunatic fringe of stuff that nobody ever thought can be useful for anything to being at the middle stage,” he says.
