Pushmeet Kohli, Google DeepMind: ‘Our next challenge is to understand the semantics of DNA’
The director of the corporation’s scientific laboratory points to genomics, nuclear fusion and the development of new materials as future areas of exploration for his team
Artificial intelligence has become a fundamental tool of scientific advancement. “As a computer scientist, I believe that the human being is the most complex program ever written. It’s amazing to be able to access a piece of that code,” says Pushmeet Kohli, vice-president of research at Google DeepMind. He knows what he’s talking about. His boss, Demis Hassabis, and colleague John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contribution to “protein structure prediction” using artificial intelligence. The award recognizes the utility of AlphaFold2, their tool which has succeeded in describing the three-dimensional shape of 200 million proteins, key information for the understanding how organisms function.
