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10 OPINION maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 16 OCTOBER 2024 Two of three recipients of this year's chemistry Nobel made their breakthrough with AI THE 2024 Nobel Prizes have marked a turning point in rec- ognising artificial intelligence (AI) within the scientific com- munity, primarily through its impact on biology and phys- ics. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, David Baker from the Univer- sity of Washington, Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto and John Hopfield from Princeton University were honoured for their con- tributions to solving age-old challenges with AI. Their work has not only transformed our understanding of life's building blocks but also provided new tools for advancing medicine and understanding the human brain. This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry celebrated break- throughs in protein science, a cornerstone of biology. Hassa- bis and Jumper earned recogni- tion for developing AlphaFold2, an AI model that solved one of biology's most complex prob- lems: predicting how proteins fold. Proteins are made of ami- no acids; their function is de- termined by how these chains fold into three-dimensional structures. Scientists strug- gled to predict these structures from amino acid sequences for decades. AlphaFold2, released in 2020, revolutionised this by accurately mapping the struc- tures of over 200 million pro- teins. This technology allows researchers worldwide to ac- cess a detailed map of nearly every known protein, enabling advances in drug discovery, disease understanding, and bi- otechnology. David Baker, who shared the chemistry prize, brought a complementary approach to computational protein design. Since the early 2000s, his lab has developed software capable of designing entirely new pro- teins that do not exist in nature. These custom-designed pro- teins have applications ranging from novel pharmaceuticals to advanced materials. Together, these advancements have been described as a "molecular tel- escope," allowing scientists to observe and design proteins with unprecedented precision, accelerating medical research and applications. While the Chemistry Prize focused on biological appli- cations, the Nobel Prize in Physics highlighted the origins of AI technologies that made such breakthroughs possible. Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "godfather of AI," and John Hopfield were honoured for their foundational work on neural networks, which under- pin modern AI. Beginning in the 1980s, their research laid the groundwork for the mod- els that power technologies like AlphaFold2. Hinton's contributions in- clude the development of the Boltzmann machine, an early neural network model that can learn from data to identify pat- terns and relationships. This model, inspired by concepts in statistical physics, allowed computers to autonomously discover characteristics in data, a principle that remains central to deep learning today. John Hopfield, meanwhile, created the Hopfield network, which models associative memory and has applications in under- standing how the brain stores and retrieves information. His work introduced methods that helped researchers model how neurons interact to form mem- ories, a concept that has been influential in both AI and neu- roscience. These advances in machine learning have had a profound impact on numerous fields. Beyond their foundational role in AI, Hinton and Hopfield's models have been instrumental in understanding how neural circuits work in the brain and in developing AI tools that an- alyse large datasets in various scientific disciplines. The No- bel Committee's recognition of their work stresses the role of AI not just as a tool for compu- tation but as a way to explore and interpret the complexities of the natural world. The achievements of these scientists represent a blend- ing of disciplines that are re- shaping the frontiers of re- search. AI's role in decoding protein structures has opened up vast possibilities for med- ical advancements. With Al- phaFold2's ability to rapidly predict protein structures, re- searchers can now design tar- geted treatments for diseases like cancer or understand an- tibiotic resistance mechanisms. The insights provided by AI al- so facilitate the design of new enzymes that could help break down plastics, addressing envi- ronmental challenges. Meanwhile, Hinton and Hop- field's contributions to physics illustrate how understanding fundamental concepts of learn- ing and memory in artificial systems can enrich our under- standing of the human brain. Today, their work serves as the foundation for advances in everything from image recog- nition to natural language pro- cessing, impacting daily tech- nologies like smartphones and self-driving cars. Their neural network models have become tools for engineers and neu- roscientists aiming to map the brain's intricate networks. The Nobel recognition signals a broader shift in how we value scientific discovery. By honour- ing AI contributions in chem- istry and physics, the Nobel How AI redefined the Nobel Prizes in 2024 Prof. Alexiei Dingli is Professor of Artificial Intelligence Alexiei Dingli