How DeepMind is unlocking the secrets of dopamine and protein folding with AI

Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind with the goal of unlocking answers to some of the world's toughest questions by recreating intelligence itself. His ambition remains just that -- an ambition -- but Hassabis and colleagues inched closer to realizing it this week with the publication of papers in Nature addressing two formidable challenges in biomedicine. The first paper originated from DeepMind's neuroscience team, and it advances the notion that an AI research development might serve as a framework for understanding how the brain learns. The other paper focuses on DeepMind's work with respect to protein folding -- work which it detailed in December 2018. Both follow on the heels of DeepMind's work in applying AI to the prediction of acute kidney injury, or AKI, and to challenging game environments such as Go, shogi, chess, dozens of Atari games, and Activision Blizzard's StarCraft II.