LONDON: An executive from a large technology firm has just won a Nobel. On Wednesday (Oct 9)hawkplay, the top prize for chemistry went to the head of Alphabet’s AI efforts, Demis Hassabis, along with two other key scientists, for a years-long project that used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins. The day before, Geoffrey Hinton, a former executive at Google who’s been called a godfather of AI, won the Nobel prize for physics along with physicist John Hopfield, for work on machine learning.

It seems the Nobel Foundation is eager to mark AI advancements – and the notion that key scientific problems can be solved computationally – as worthy of its coveted prizes. That will be a reputational boon for firms like Google and executives like Hassabis. But there’s a risk too that such recognition obscures concerns about both the technology itself and the increasing concentration of AI power in a handful of companies.

Hassabis himself has long craved this accolade, having told staff for years that that he wanted DeepMind, the AI lab he co-founded and sold to Google in 2015, to win between three and five Nobel Prizes over the next decade.

At a press conference on Wednesday, he called the award “an unbelievable honour of a lifetime” and said he’d been hoping to win it this time around. Indeed, he initially shaped DeepMind as a research lab with utopian objectiveshawkplay, where many of its leading scientists worked on building AI systems to help cure diseases like cancer or solve global warming.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaks about Google DeepMind at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, California, May 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

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