DeepMind: AI will solve humanity’s biggest questions – 04/16/2024 – Tech

When British scientist Demis Hassabis was a boy, his favorite subject was physics and his dream was to be able to answer humanity’s biggest questions. But he didn’t study physics or philosophy, but rather computing.

“I read a lot of my favorite physicists, my scientific heroes, and in the last 20 or 30 years, little progress has been made in understanding some fundamental questions,” said Hassabis, a former video game developer with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, co-founder of DeepMind , a research laboratory purchased by Google in 2014.

“So I thought: why not build the ultimate tool to help us? And that tool is artificial intelligence.”

Hassabis gave an interview to Chris Anderson, curator of TED, a series of talks that began on Monday in Vancouver (Canada). The event celebrates its 40th anniversary following the tradition of always being up to date with the latest technologies.

Most of this year’s speakers work with AI and, throughout the corridors of the convention center, the two letters are omnipresent in the exhibitors’ stands, among artists, businesspeople and scientists.

DeepMind is a pioneering AI company, famous for creating the AlphaFold program, which can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequence. Years earlier, they developed the first program to beat a human at the game Go, which is more complex than chess.

“The general rule is that it takes a PhD student four or five years to discover a structure [de proteína], but there are 200 million proteins in nature. It would take forever to do it all,” Hassabis said. “Using AlphaFold, we discovered all of these 200 million in one year.”

The result is part of an open source database, which Hassabis believes that many biologists and pharmaceutical companies around the world are currently using.

“Each protein has a special function in nature, they are almost like works of art,” said Hassabis, AI advisor to the British government. “It’s what biologists need to design drugs and understand diseases. If you know the shape of the protein, then you know which part of its surface you need to target with your drug compound.”

For Hassabis, these advances are just the beginning of the kind of progress that tools like AI can bring, achieving a type of human-like or higher intelligence, dubbed AGI (in literal Portuguese, artificial general intelligence).

“If we get it right, we will enter an incredible new era of radical abundance, curing all diseases, spreading consciousness to the stars,” he said. “And once I build an AGI, I want to use it to understand the fundamental nature of reality. It’s the best technique we have for understanding the enormity of the universe around us.”

Ted turns 40 with new slogan

TED runs until Friday and will bring a variety of voices about AI, some not so optimistic about the speed of its advancement. For Chris Anderson, who has led TED since 2002, the event wants to celebrate all possibilities.

“We don’t want to naively get caught up in any of those mindsets,” Anderson said. “It’s a very rich conversation. Where it will take us, I don’t know. But it’s okay to be excited. There’s a lot of potential for truly dramatic scientific breakthroughs.”

To celebrate TED’s 40th anniversary, which began as small meetings about technology, entertainment and design in the Californian city of Monterey, Anderson announced a new slogan, “ideas change everything”, to replace the classic “ideas worth spreading”. worth spreading).

He explained that in this era of “doomscrolling” (English name for the excessive consumption of online content) it is easy to consider any video as “dopamine doses”, diminishing the value of TED Talks, videos of lectures published online that have already been viewed more 30 billion times.

“We’re not dopamine hits. Our content matters. So the new tagline is just a more confident statement that ideas matter,” Anderson said. “When you want to invest in ongoing training, ideas change you, and ideas change the world.”