71–80 of 343 posts
First Obama got the Peace Prize Nobel, now Demis Hassabis gets the Chemistry Nobel. I expect at a minimum the Nobel Prize in Literature to be Donald E. Knuth.
The Nobel Prize in Literature should go to Jeff Bezos for the Amazon Kindle, obviously!
While I am skeptical about yesterdays award in physics, these are totally deserved and spot on. There are few approaches that will accelerate the field of drug development and chemistry as a whole in a way that the works of these three people will. Congratulations!
Are they? What did Demis do?
The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized. I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development. These AI dem…
I think one must also give him the credit for the vision, risk taking and drive to apply the resources at his disposal, and RL, to these particular problems.
Without that push this research would never have been done, but there may have been many fungible people willing to iron out the details (and, to be fair, contribute some important ideas along the way).
I’m not a proponent of the “great man” theory of history, but based on the above I can see that this could be fair (although I have no way of telling if internally this is actually how it played out).
The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized. I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development. These AI dem…
The Nobel prize cannot go to a team so they have to pick individuals. This is true for many (most?) nobel prize awards. Consider for example the discovery of gravity waves - the team that built and operated LIGO was huge, but they have to pick. This has commonly been the case since the inception of the prizes - the professor gets the prize, the PhD students and postdocs don't usually. Not saying this is right, but it…
Demis Hasabis has a really interesting and unusual CV for a nobel laureate [1], he started his career in AI game programming (he worked e.g. on Popoulous II, Syndicate, Theme Park for Bullfrog, and later for Lionhead Studios on Black & White) before doing a PhD in neuroscience, becoming an entrepreneur and starting DeepMind. I would say this is a refreshing and highly uncommon pick for a nobel prize, really cool to s…
Did Demis Hasabis actually do any scientific work himself?
The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized. I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development. These AI dem…