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David Baker is sleep-deprived but happy. He’s just won the Nobel prize, after all.
The call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences woke him in the middle of the night. Or rather, his wife did. She answered the phone at their home in Washington, D.C. and screamed that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The prize is the ultimate recognition of his work as a biochemist at the University of Washington.
“I woke up at two [a.m.] and basically didn’t sleep through the whole day, which was all parties and stuff,” he told me the day after the announcement. “I’m looking forward to getting back to normal a little bit today.”
Last week was a major milestone for AI, with two Nobel prizes awarded for AI-related discoveries.
Baker wasn’t alone in winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded it to Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, a director at the same company, too. Google DeepMind was awarded for its research on AlphaFold, a tool which can predict how proteins are structured, while Baker was recognized for his work using AI to design new proteins. Read more about it here.
Meanwhile, the physics prize went to Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and ’90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, and fellow computer scientist John Hopfield, who invented a type of pattern-matching neural network that can store and reconstruct data. Read more about it here.
Speaking to reporters after the prize was announced, Hassabis said he believes that it will herald more AI tools being used for significant scientific discoveries.
But there is one problem. AI needs masses of high-quality data to be useful for science, and databases containing that sort of data are rare, says Baker.
The prize is a recognition for the whole community of people working as protein designers. It will help move protein design from the “lunatic fringe of stuff that no one ever thought would be useful for anything to being at the center stage,” he says.
AI has been a gamechanger for biochemists like Baker. Seeing what DeepMind was able to do with AlphaFold made it clear that deep learning was going to be a powerful tool for their work.
“There’s just all these problems that were really hard before that we are now having much more success with thanks to generative AI methods. We can do much more complicated things,” Baker says.
Baker is already busy at work. He says his team is focusing on designing enzymes, which carry out all the chemical reactions that living things rely upon to exist. His team is also working on medicines that only act at the right time and place in the body.
But Baker is hesitant in calling this a watershed moment for AI in science.
In AI there’s a saying: Garbage in, garbage out. If the data that is fed into AI models is not good, the outcomes won’t be dazzling either.
The power of the Chemistry Nobel Prize-winning AI tools lies in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a rare treasure trove of high-quality, curated and standardized data. This is exactly the kind of data that AI needs to do anything useful. But the current trend in AI development is training ever-larger models on the entire content of the internet, which is increasingly full of AI-generated slop. This slop in turn gets sucked into datasets and pollutes the outcomes, leading to bias and errors. That’s just not good enough for rigorous scientific discovery.
“If there were many databases as good as the PDB, I would say, yes, this [prize] probably is just the first of many, but it is kind of a unique database in biology,” Baker says. “It’s not just the methods, it’s the data. And there aren’t so many places where we have that kind of data.”
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