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

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	AI is not sort of nice to have. It's basically almost a necessity for us to make sense and reason about any problem that we are now looking at.
0:09.0	I think there's going to be this really fun cultural shift where 10 years ago people would say oh it's
0:14.6	ridiculous a computer could try to do these things I think 10 years from now people
0:18.9	be like what's a ridiculous to have a human being to that like you can't load all these numbers in your head.
0:24.0	Essentially, what we have entered is basically an age where a single human mind
0:30.0	cannot comprehend the data that we are capturing about the units.
0:34.0	One of these structures may have taken the length of a PhD right to solve a single structure
0:39.5	and now we're talking about true scale.
0:41.0	There have been 1.6 or 7 million users of the Alphold database.
0:47.0	Now if that is not a positive statement about the planet, then I don't know what it is.
0:52.0	There are 1.7 billion people interested in protein structure predation.
0:56.0	I'm really happy about that.
0:57.8	The last few years have been peppered with AI announcements.
1:02.1	Let's recap a few. April 2022. have been peppered with AI announcements.
1:02.5	Let's recap a few.
1:04.0	April 2022, Dolly 2 is released.
1:07.2	Mid- Journey in Staple Diffusion Fast Followed that Summer.
1:10.4	Then in November, Chat UPT arrives.
1:13.0	Then, 2023 features the release of Claude, Lama, and Mistral-7B,
1:18.0	just to name a few models.
1:20.0	And we're only a quarter or so into 2024 and we're already seeing the expansion into AI music and video models faster than almost anyone could have imagined.
1:30.0	And while much of the attention circles around creative tools, there was an AI unlock in biology that caught much attention in 2021.
	...

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