It has been a big week for Nobel Prizes in the world of artificial intelligence. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners for 2024 were announced today by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Director John Jumper share one half, while David Baker-of whom one might describe as the head of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington-takes the other half.

News comes just one day after AI pioneers Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational contributions to machine learning and AI.

Hassabis and Jumper won "protein structure prediction," and Baker's was "computational protein design."

Protein fix
Proteins are, in essence, the building blocks of life, so there was immense scope for revolution by DeepMind in its work on AlphaFold. Though everyone had been harping about the potential for it for years, the Google subsidiary presented the second version of the AI model in 2020, almost going the whole way toward solving a problem that had stumped the scientists for years-that is to say, predicting the 3D structure of proteins using nothing more than their genetic sequence.

Determined by its shape, the protein dictates how it works. Until now, finding that shape involved arduous years in the lab. But AlphaFold might speed all that up into just hours, which covers a vast majority of the 200 million different proteins in existence. It's some historical breakthrough because it is information crucial to things like drug discovery, disease diagnosis, and bioengineering.

One of the discoveries recognized this year concerns building spectacular proteins, said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. "The other is that realization of a long-standing dream: the prediction of protein structures from the sequences of their amino acids. Both open vast new possibilities.".

Baker got his half of the prize for engineering entirely new kinds of proteins, designed computationally to perform specific functions within pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and so on.

Hassabis was born in London in 1976 and was recognized as a child prodigy in a number of fields from an early age and attained master status in chess while a teenager. He also served as lead programmer at U.K. Video game developer Bullfrog Productions, and he has a degree from the University of Cambridge in first-class honors in Computer Science before founding DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, who Microsoft hired earlier this year from AI startup Inflection AI.

Google bought DeepMind in 2014 for more than half a billion dollars, and Jumper began working with the company as a research scientist three years ago. It's also worth noting here that Hassabis was awarded a U.K. knighthood for 'services to artificial intelligence' back in March.

In addition to the international prestige that follows the award, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry includes a cash prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to $1 million. Half of this goes to David Baker, with the remaining amount split between Hassabis and Jumper.