AlphaZero Creator Demis Hassabis Wins Nobel Prize For Chemistry

48-year-old CM Demis Hassabis, a former child chess prodigy and the founder of DeepMind, the company that revolutionized computer chess, has won the 2024 Nobel Prize For Chemistry. He shared half the 11m Swedish kronor ($1.06m) prize with Professor John Humper (39) for their work on "protein folding predictions," while Professor David Baker (60) won the other half for advances in "computational protein design."

Hassabis could once boast of being the second highest-rated chess player in the world under 14, behind GM Judit Polgar, but his career path took him to academia, then computer gaming, then back to academia, and then finally to set up DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company that was acquired by Google and used board games as a stepping stone to bigger things.

AlphaZero: A Revolution In Computer Chess

DeepMind's impact on chess came in 2017, when a scientific paper was published revealing that AlphaZero, a reinforcement learning algorithm using neural networks, had needed only the rules and four hours playing against itself to become the strongest chess entity in existence. It was reported to have defeated the leading chess engine Stockfish in a 100-game match by 28 wins to zero, while also achieving similar results in Go and Shogi. 

The impact of AlphaZero's style has since been felt everywhere in the chess world, with the open-source Leela Chess Zero project proving the same methods worked even without Google's computing resources, while Stockfish later adopted the technology—long gone were the carefully human-weighted criteria and knowledge for evaluating positions. The challenge was also for chess players to adapt to a world where the rules-of-thumb and positional understanding they grew up with often had to be abandoned. 

For Hassabis, meanwhile, there were bigger fish to fry.

Hassabis Receives Nobel Prize For Chemistry: "Unbelievably special!" 

Earlier this year, Hassabis was knighted for his "services to artificial intelligence" in the United Kingdom...

Delighted and honoured to receive a Knighthood for services to AI. It’s been an incredible journey so far building @GoogleDeepMind over the past 15 years, helping accelerate the field and grow the UK & global AI ecosystems. Thanks to everyone who helped make this dream possible!

— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) March 28, 2024

...but a much greater honor was to follow: the Nobel Prize.

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.” pic.twitter.com/gYrdFFcD4T

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

The award was given for his work on another member of the Alpha family, AlphaFold (or specifically AlphaFold2, released in 2020), which was built to tackle the "building blocks of life," the proteins that are found in every cell of the human body. They're made out of chains of amino acids, but working out how those chains fold to form three-dimensional shapes was described as a 50-year-old problem in The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' press release. 

The AI-powered approach of Hassabis and Humper was wildly successful, enabling the prediction of the structure of almost all the 200 million known proteins. 

This year’s chemistry laureates Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model, AlphaFold2, to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.

Check out two examples of protein structures determined using AlphaFold2. First up, a bacterial enzyme… pic.twitter.com/ckIiIAGGMX

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

Two million people from 190 countries have since used AlphaFold, with the Swedish Academy of Sciences summarizing:

"Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind."

Hassabis' first reaction was understandably shock. He commented:

"It’s unbelievably special. It’s actually really surreal, to be honest. It hasn’t really sunk in, but it’s an incredible honor. It’s the big one, really."

“It’s unbelievably special, it hasn’t really sunk in. It's the big one really!”

2024 chemistry laureate Demis Hassabis was still overwhelmed by the news when we spoke to him today. In this interview moments after the prize announcement, he talks about his passion for science… pic.twitter.com/h6m38zxyOR

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2024

He went on to explain that this is just the beginning.

"The reason I’ve worked on AI my whole life is that I’m passionate about science and finding out knowledge. I’ve always thought if we could build AI in the right way it could be the ultimate tool to help scientists, to help us explore the universe around us, and I hope AlphaFold is a first example of that." 

14th World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik, who worked on a project with DeepMind, revealed some of Hassabis' ambitions:

Congratulations to Demis Hassabis with the first Nobel price. I remember Demis told me his goal is two Nobel prices and AI being able to answer ALL questions about our existance in his life time. Dont know if the second is achievable or even wishable, but first seems realistic 👍 pic.twitter.com/P99rVaTct3

— Vladimir Kramnik (@VBkramnik) October 9, 2024

Praise has been incoming from many figures in the chess world, including one heartwarming exchange. Hassabis congratulated 15-year-old GM Shreyas Royal on officially becoming the youngest-ever English grandmaster—and then a day later Royal was able to return the compliment! 

Huge congratulations to you on being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

— Shreyas Royal (@shrez_royal09) October 9, 2024

Whatever comes next for Hassabis, chess will have been a part of the story!