Article Source

• Accelerating Scientific Discovery with AI - lecture by Sir Demis Hassabis

Accelerating Scientific Discovery with AI

Abstract

On a visit to Cambridge in March 2025, Sir Demis Hassabis - who in 2024 became our first alumnus to receive a Nobel Prize - gave this talk on ‘Accelerating Scientific Discovery with AI’.

The co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with his DeepMind colleague Dr John Jumper “for protein structure prediction”. This was in recognition of the major advances made possible by their AI model AlphaFold2, with whose help they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.

In this lecture, he describes his journey from a child chess prodigy whose interest in computers was sparked by using them to improve his chess game, to his time at Cambridge University to his AI career today. And he talks about how the AI tools Google DeepMind is developing have the capacity to greatly speed up discoveries in areas of science from health to the environment, and more.