Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis: 'In 10 or 15 years we'll be in a new golden era of discovery'
The head of Google DeepMind believes AI will change medicine beyond recognition and help cure major diseases. He isn't speaking in a vacuum: his AlphaFold has already predicted the shapes of more than 200 million proteins and is used by more than three million researchers.
Demis Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence that predicts the shape of proteins, a problem biology had been trying to solve for about 50 years. He now runs Google DeepMind and is one of the most optimistic voices about what comes next. In an interview with Fortune he put it this way: “In 10, 15 years’ time, we’ll be in a kind of new golden era of discovery,” a new renaissance for science.
What is already happening
- AlphaFold has predicted the structure of more than 200 million proteins and is used by more than three million researchers worldwide to study diseases and design drugs.
- Its sister company, Isomorphic Labs, is searching for cancer drugs with AI. Hassabis believes the approach could be “1,000 times more efficient” than lab work alone.
What he expects
- “Medicine won’t look like it does today”: personalised treatments and cures for major diseases.
- New AI-discovered materials to help with solar power or fusion.
Feet on the ground
These are forecasts, not results. Hassabis himself warns of a turbulent transition period, a decade of rapid change. And medicine’s history is full of promises that took longer than expected. But the person saying it has already solved one of biology’s great problems, and AI is already bearing fruit in clinics and labs.
