Can AI Advance Science? DeepMind's VP of Science Weighs In

a16z Podcast

In recent years, the AI landscape has seen huge advancements, from the release of Dall-E 2 in April 2022 to the emergence of AI music and video models in early 2024.

While creative tools often steal the spotlight, AlphaFold 2 marked a groundbreaking AI breakthrough in biology in 2021. Since its release, this pioneering tool for predicting protein structures has been utilized by over 1.7 million scientists worldwide, influencing fields ranging from genomics to computational chemistry.

In this episode, DeepMind's VP of Research for Science, Pushmeet Kohli, and a16z General Partner Vijay Pande discuss the transformative potential of AI in scientific exploration. Can AI lead to fundamentally new discoveries in science? Let's find out.

Resources:

Find Pushmeet on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pushmeet

Find Vijay on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vijaypande

Learn more about Google DeepMind: https://deepmind.google

Read DeepMind’s AlphaFold whitepaper: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/a-glimpse-of-the-next-generation-of-alphafold

Read DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olympiad-level-ai-system-for-geometry

Read DeepMind’s research on new materials: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

Read DeepMind’s paper on FunSearch, focused on new discoveries in mathematics: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/funsearch-making-new-discoveries-in-mathematical-sciences-using-large-language-models

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