The Protein Folding Problem

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Alpefold is our system to solve what's been called the protein folding problem. The shape of a protein often is whate governs its function. So if you want to understand the function of the proteing, what it's doing, and how it goes wrong in disease, and what drugs to target and so on, you sort of need to understand the three d shape. We used that initial dateo hundred 50 thousand to train ortefold, which bespoke our innovative deep learning system with some special case thingsin it that related to biology and physics That we put into the system. And it's able to predict and take an amino acid sequence and give you back the three le structure

Demis Hassabis is one of tech's most brilliant minds. A chess-playing child prodigy turned researcher and founder of headline-making AI company DeepMind, Demis is thinking through some of the most revolutionary — and in some cases controversial — uses of artificial intelligence. From the development of computer program AlphaGo, which beat out world champions in the board game Go, to making leaps in the research of how proteins fold, Demis is at the helm of the next generation of groundbreaking technology. In this episode, he gives a peek into some of the questions that his top-level projects are asking, talks about how gaming, creativity, and intelligence inform his approach to tech, and muses on where AI is headed next.

This is an episode of "The TED Interview," a podcast in the TED Audio Collective. It's hosted by author Steven Johnson. To check out the rest of their episodes, including a recent mini-series on the future of human intelligence, follow the show wherever you're listening to this.