Sebastian Malaby

No, I think it's a real scientific revolution.

I think it's probably bigger than the industrial revolution, although that was enormous.

It's more like the invention of consciousness.

Last time we had a new form of intelligence that came into the world, it was human intelligence.

And now we have machine intelligence.

Sure.

AlphaFold was a system invented in 2020 by DeepMind, the Google AI subsidiary in London.

And what it does is it unravels all of the shapes of proteins in nature, like 200 million different intricate protein shapes, so that you can see how they look, and therefore you can figure out what kind of compounds might bind onto them.

This is useful for building new medicines, for example.

Absolutely.

I mean, I think all kinds of scientific frontiers will be more crackable in the future than they have been in the past.

We already see that in medicine with faster drug discovery, although the clinical trial process is still very long.

So we haven't seen actual drugs in human beings making them healthy yet.

But the discovery process is faster than it used to be.

Material sciences is going to be affected.

Progress in nuclear fusion is going to be affected.

It's going to be a big deal.

Well, when I say it's working, what I mean is I've spoken to researchers who are running pharmaceutical companies, and they use this tool all the time.

It used to be that you wanted to find the shape of the target protein onto which your medicine was going to bind.

And it could take a PhD biologist, you know, three or four years of work to find that shape because these proteins are very complicated and intricate in their shape.