2021: DeepMind's Miracle Year

This essay is a lightly edited version of the 37th issue of the ML4Sci newsletter. You can find more issues here and if you like what you see, feel free to sign up! Year-in-reviews always seemed like an appropriate mix of vogue and cliche, so I figured I'd take my stab at a slightly late two-part series. Google's DeepMind spent 2021 continuing to push out ground-breaking work applying AI to a variety of important scientific problems. This is perhaps one of the best groups to watch for Manhattan-style AI projects. Unrestrained by the incentives and limits of scientific academia (publish or perish, tenuous and short-term federal funding, high labor turnover i.e. grad students), DeepMind is quickly becoming the Bell Labs for AI.