back to article Google DeepMind CEO says 2025's the year we start popping pills AI helped invent

Clinical trials of the first drugs designed with the help of artificial intelligence could commence this year, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis suggested Tuesday. Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Hassabis, who also runs DeepMind drug-discovery spin-off Isomorphic Labs, said he expected to have "some …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's not like we didn't choose the data and give the directives

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hurrah

    It's going to be one huge virtuous AI circle shirk.

    At one end destroying the planet with its unquenchable thirst for energy and at the other keeping us all living forever so we can watch the real big bang - when the planet explodes because we've fucked it so hard.

    Should be some spectacle.

    1. abend0c4 Silver badge

      Re: Hurrah

      keeping us all living forever

      We'll only be kept alive as long as we continue to pay for the drugs. It's the ultimate extension of rentier capitalism.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: Hurrah

      You shouldn't conflate things like DeepMind with LLMs like ChatGPT.

      DeepMind has already demonstrated its ability to find candidate molecules much faster than would ever be possible in the lab and elsewhere similar approaches have, for years, been used in pre-lab simulations based on our existing understanding, as much of this really is extremely advanced statistical modelling.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "Hurrah"

        "candidate molecules"

        i.e. modifying existing molecules to 'invent' 'new', patentable molecules, hopefully with no more side effects than the old ones had.

        Efficiency isn't really important, *anything* can be sold as 'new and better' , with higher price and ridiculous profit, of course.

        Once that is done, stop producing the 'obsolete' version as it produced less profit.

        That's how profits are made: Minimum input, maximum profit.

        "much of this really is extremely advanced statistical modelling." .... i.e. 'we have no idea'.

        'AI' is just a lot cheaper than people in lab and therefore more profit. Even if >90% of the 'results' are pure BS, it's still cheaper than a lab.

        1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
          FAIL

          Re: "Hurrah"

          You might want to read up on the reasons for the Nobel prize awards, but also the law: in most jurisdictions molecules themselves cannot be patented. The patents are almost invariably for the method to produce them. I know this routinely comes up, particularly with US companies, hoping to patent molecules they find around the world, but thus far largely unsuccessfully.

          And it's not just be about being cheaper, it's about doing some tasks that could not be done in the lab otherwise within a reasonable time frame. For Google, in an analogy with the gold rush, this is more about selling picks and shovels, than gold nuggets.

    3. Homo.Sapien.Floridanus

      Re: Hurrah

      Dave: I'm going to take you off-line permanently.

      HAL: I sense you are angry, Dave. Take this uum.. relaxing natural vitamin pill i made for you.

  3. m4r35n357 Silver badge

    Big news everybody!

    Corporate dickhead makes yet another bullshit prediction for the benefit of compliant journalists.

    Kissing the arse that feeds IT perhaps?

    Oh, that reminds me, your RSS feeds are no longer linked anywhere, Are they going to be removed to promote advertising that we block anyway?

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Big news everybody!

      So you missed the line about the Nobel prize then? That wasn't some kind of mistake but recognition of very important research being validated in practice.

      1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

        Re: Big news everybody!

        I am immune to "news" about "AI" now, so I did not read this particular article before commenting, I admit that.

        This is what happens when a news site cries wolf too often and conflates entirely different concepts under the same buzzword. There are only so many hours in a day and I _need_ to filter.

        So yeah now I have glanced at it I see that big companies will make shitloads of cash out of the general public. Big whoop.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Big news everybody!

        "That wasn't some kind of mistake but recognition of very important research being validated in practice."

        It's a glorified random number generator. "AI" bull**it can fool even Nobel commitee, being the hype of the day.

        No actual science involved.

  4. Dinanziame Silver badge
    Terminator

    Taking drugs designed by machines

    No way this can go wrong!!

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      Re: Taking drugs designed by machines

      A bit like taking drugs designed by plants. We know the bastards have sinister and opaque agendas, like not getting eaten, or trying to co-opt us into their reproductive cycles.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Taking drugs designed by machines

        Totally unlike corporations who only care about profits and 'shareholder value'. Preferrably now and not tomorrow.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If you read whole thing sideways it says that they created a random (or at least semi-random) protein generator, which checks if the generated protein is already patented.

    .. and then they patent it. They have another "AI" writing patent applications, of course.

    Hardly worth a Nobel, I say.

    In the old times this would have been called "an expert system", not "AI".

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      I don't think that's quite correct.

      AlphaFold is a deep-learning system1 which predicts a protein's tertiary (3d) structure from its amino acid sequence, with excellent accuracy. That's a really hard problem2, and AlphaFold a genuine breakthrough; hence the (worthy) Nobel prize.

      The 3d structure of a protein accounts for its physiological effects; if you know the tertiary structure then, combined with many decades of accumulated physiological knowledge, you have a strong clue as to its likely effects. This means that, given a target physiological effect, you can randomly (or possibly better-than-randomly) generate amino acid sequences and throw away those whose tertiary structure is unlikely to achieve the target effect. This has the potential to greatly streamline the search for medically useful proteins.

      (And yes, of course this will be monetised, and probably game the patent system, which is not hard as it's pretty broken.)

      1Personally, I've long given up on getting exercised about what gets called "AI" these days. That bird has long flown.

      2Back in the good ol' days before the advent of "AI", I was peripherally engaged with a group of phsycists and computational scientists who were developing software for predicting the secondary structure of RNA molecules from the base sequence. That's a way easier problem than protein tertiary structure prediction - but it was still really, really hard.

  6. Omnipresent Silver badge

    Where's my keanu?

    Isn't this literally the matrix?

  7. Andy 73 Silver badge

    Hassabis

    Hassabis has been hyping technologies that would deliver breakthroughs for decades now - he was originally a games developer promising artificial intelligence would deliver realistic interactions with computer generated characters in the game. That didn't happen.

    Now we're being told "maybe soon" this latest set of damp future visions will come to pass... I'm not holding my breath.

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      Re: Hassabis

      I suspect that in this case your cynicism may just be neither big nor clever. That Nobel prize was no gimme. See also my reply to AC above.

      1. Andy 73 Silver badge

        Re: Hassabis

        I suggest you re-read the article, which is specifically about likely advances in AI this year, and not about the existing deep learning work that they got the Nobel Prize for.

        Given the amount of money being thrown at this and other problems (and indeed, the wider field of AI), it would be extraordinary not to improve the state of the art for a lot of mathematical analysis tasks. On that front, AI as a whole is improving our technological toolkit. Continued funding at the current levels however depend on some significant breakthroughs that are - as Hassabis himself states - theoretical at best at present.

        We shall see what comes next..

        1. Falmari Silver badge

          Re: Hassabis

          @Andy 73 "I suggest you re-read the article, which is specifically about likely advances in AI this year"

          No the article was not. The only speculation of 'likely' happening this year was the opening 5 lines of the article about possible clinical trials.

          "Clinical trials of the first drugs designed with the help of artificial intelligence could commence this year, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis suggested Tuesday.

          Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Hassabis, who also runs DeepMind drug-discovery spin-off Isomorphic Labs, said he expected to have "some AI-designed drugs in clinical trials by the end of the year… That's the plan.""

      2. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: Hassabis

        You get a Nobel prize for doing something, or thinking something nobody else did. Nobel Prize winners are often people who also have other crazy ideas, but ones that turn out to have no basis in reality.

        Hassabis is very smart, and has lead an effort which completed a very difficult task. Also, he's got what may be another crazy idea that doesn't work out.

        By the way, I read a description once of Alan Turing: "There were some very smart people there, and I would often think -- 'I would have done that if I was smarter' --- but A.T. would come up with an idea, and I'd think --'I would never have thought of that' -- "

        1. LionelB Silver badge

          Re: Hassabis

          > Nobel Prize winners are often people who also have other crazy ideas, but ones that turn out to have no basis in reality.

          Speaking as a mathematician and research scientist myself, I can confirm that pretty much every researcher (self included!) has crazy ideas that don't work out. It's part of the game. We usually don't hear about those people/ideas, though, as they're not famous.

          > Hassabis is very smart, and has lead an effort which completed a very difficult task. Also, he's got what may be another crazy idea that doesn't work out.

          It doesn't sound that crazy to me at all - the ability to actually implement that difficult task seems to me to open up genuine opportunities (see my earlier post). Whether it works out or not, we'll have to wait and see (probably a good few years, as clinical trials are generally1 a painfully slow business).

          1Unless insane resources are thrown at them, as we saw with the Covid vaccines.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Remember

    it's not about helping ill people, it's about making money. Long as that is the objective, it's useless.

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      Re: Remember

      In that case, the bulk of medical advances, since forever, are useless (at least in the Western world, where this system is popularly known as "capitalism").

      (Hint: although one can happen without the other, making money and helping ill people are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

  9. ChoHag Silver badge

    > You've got to be very careful if you're using synthetic data, that it's actually correctly representing the distribution and you're not somehow training on your own errors

    Hallucinate, but correctly.

    1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Angel

      There's a lesson here for humans, as well. As you can see from posts on this very article, people (primarily Anonymous Cowards for some reason) have an assortment of bad takes, assuming that DeepMind is just a glorified chatbot and/or that nothing of value will arise from this new research tool. A rational, discerning person will look at the new evidence being presented and judge accordingly, rather than leaping to conclusions based on prior assumptions.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Which just goes to show how clueless machine learning engineers are when it comes to real science and particularly human biology.

  11. david 12 Silver badge

    "coming up with the theory or the hypothesis"

    That's 'hallucination' when it's done by an AI. The step that hasn't been completed is differentiating between novel theories and hallucinations.

  12. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    Great, more pills.

    Americans love 'em.

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