The 2024 Nobel Prizes will be remembered as the year that artificial intelligence took the awards by storm. The physics prize this week was awarded to two scientists, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who laid the groundwork for the field of machine learning. The next day, the chemistry prize went to a trio of researchers whose work built on Hopfield and Hinton’s principles, developing AI models that predict the structure of proteins and design entirely new ones.
Structural biologists have hailed the AI work of the chemistry laureates — David Baker of the University of Washington, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at Alphabet-owned DeepMind — as sensational discoveries driving major change in drug discovery and fundamental biology research. But to that scientific community, the chemistry prize is also a sign of the power of collective research, freely shared.
Now that these efforts have yielded fruit ripe for commercialization, though, the open spirit that’s allowed that scientific progress may be in jeopardy as companies begin to pull back on what they share publicly.
