Way back in 2011 Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist with aspirations to be a public intellectual, published an essay entitled “Why Software Is Eating the World”, predicting that computer code would take over large swaths of the economy. Thirteen years on, software now seems to be chomping its way through academia as well. This, at any rate, is one possible conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton shares the 2024 Nobel prize in physics with John Hopfield, and that the computer scientist Demis Hassabis shares half of the Nobel prize in chemistry with one of his DeepMind colleagues, John Jumper.
The award to Hassabis and Jumper was, in a way, predictable, for they built a machine – AlphaFold2 – that enables researchers to solve one of the toughest problems in biochemistry: predicting the structure of proteins, the building blocks of biological life. Their machine has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200m proteins that researchers have identified. So it’s a big deal – for chemistry.
