By Demis Hassabis
Publication Date: 2026-03-10 15:00:00
Catalyzing breakthroughs in science
By demonstrating that it can navigate the vast search space of a Go board, AlphaGo demonstrated the potential of AI to help us better understand the vast complexity of the physical world. We began by trying to solve the protein folding problem, a 50-year grand challenge to predict the 3D structure of proteins – information critical to understanding diseases and developing new drugs.
In 2020, we finally solved this long-standing scientific problem with our AlphaFold 2 system. From there, we folded the structures of all 200 million proteins known to science and made them freely available to scientists in an open-source database. Today, over 3 million researchers around the world use the AlphaFold database to accelerate their important work on everything from malaria vaccines to plastic-eating enzymes. And in 2024, it was the honor of our lives for John Jumper and me to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for leading this project…
