DeepMind's superpowerful AI sets its sights on drug discovery

LONDON – DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company owned by Alphabet Inc., is planning to let its software learn how to fold proteins, an important problem for drug discovery. The company is best known for AlphaGo, software that beat the world's top human players at the ancient strategy game go. But now it has created software based on a different design, called AlphaGo Zero, which can beat all previous versions of AlphaGo. Unlike earlier versions, AlphaGo Zero learned completely from scratch, with no knowledge of how humans play the game, DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis said at a news conference held ahead of the publication of the new research in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday. DeepMind's latest project shows how its studies could be of increasing practical importance to its parent company.