In a remarkable convergence of biology and artificial intelligence (AI), AlphaFold has emerged as a game-changer in the quest to understand the building blocks of life.
Developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), this AI system can accurately predict the intricate 3D structures of proteins, a feat that has challenged scientists for decades and earned its developers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 9, 2024.
Here, the Investing News Network takes a deep dive into what AlphaFold is, how AlphaFold works, the history of DeepMind and the exciting investment opportunities emerging from this cutting-edge technology.
What is AlphaFold?
AlphaFold is an AI program that can predict protein structures by analyzing massive databases of known protein shapes and their corresponding amino acid sequences. It was trained and developed on Google’s supercomputers.
AlphaFold 2, the second iteration of the program, is accessible via its open-source code and a public database of protein structure predictions, enabling researchers to access pre-computed structures. Researchers can also download the program and run their own experiments.
DeepMind released AlphaFold 3 in May 2024 with limited access, with some capabilities accessible through the AlphaFold Server. Full access to the model is expected eventually, but no release date has been set.
What is DeepMind?
Inspired by neuroscience, DeepMind is a startup specializing in developing general-purpose AI. The company’s AI systems use a type of machine learning called reinforcement learning, where the AI learns through trial and error by interacting with its environment. DeepMind’s objective was to “solve intelligence, and then solve everything else.”
DeepMind was launched in London in 2010. Demis Hassabis, a British computational neuroscientist, was a co-founder of DeepMind, alongside Shane Legg, a machine learning researcher, and Mustafa Suleyman, an AI entrepreneur who left the company in 2019.
Researchers originally used games to test their programs’ learning capabilities. The company had a major breakthrough in 2013 when it developed an AI algorithm that could learn how to play Atari games just by observing the game screen, with no human input or instructions. The company’s findings were presented at the NIPS Deep Learning Workshop in December 2013.
On January 27, 2014, shortly after DeepMind published its Atari research paper, the company was acquired by Google for around US$650 million, and eventually integrated its technology into Google’s product offerings such as Google Maps and Google Assistant. In 2023, DeepMind merged with Google’s deep learning AI research team, Google Brain, to form Google DeepMind.
Google’s acquisition enabled DeepMind to scale and accelerate its research. DeepMind inked a deal with…
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