The decision from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences woke him in the midst of the evening. Or quite, his spouse did. She answered the telephone at their dwelling in Washington, D.C. and screamed that he’d received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The prize is the final word recognition of his work as a biochemist on the College of Washington.
“I wakened at two [a.m.] and principally did not sleep by way of the entire day, which was all events and stuff,” he advised me the day after the announcement. “I am trying ahead to getting again to regular slightly bit right now.”
Final week was a significant milestone for AI, with two Nobel prizes awarded for AI-related discoveries.
Baker wasn’t alone in profitable 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 on the similar firm, too. Google DeepMind was awarded for its analysis on AlphaFold, a software which might predict how proteins are structured, whereas Baker was acknowledged for his work utilizing AI to design new proteins. Learn extra about it right here.
In the meantime, the physics prize went to Geoffrey Hinton, a pc scientist whose pioneering work on deep studying within the Eighties and ’90s underpins the entire strongest AI fashions on this planet right now, and fellow pc scientist John Hopfield, who invented a sort of pattern-matching neural community that may retailer and reconstruct knowledge. Learn extra about it right here.
Talking to reporters after the prize was introduced, Hassabis mentioned he believes that it’s going to herald extra AI instruments getting used for vital scientific discoveries.
However there may be one drawback. AI wants plenty of high-quality knowledge to be helpful for science, and databases containing that form of knowledge are uncommon, says Baker.
The prize is a recognition for the entire group of individuals working as protein designers. It is going to assist transfer protein design from the “lunatic fringe of stuff that nobody ever thought can be helpful for something to being on the heart stage,” he says.