TED Health How AI is saving billions of years of human research time | Max Jaderberg
Jan 20, 2026
Max Jaderberg reveals how AI is revolutionizing scientific research, potentially compressing years of work into mere seconds. He discusses the breakthroughs of AlphaFold, which saves billions of years in protein research. Jaderberg highlights the cutting-edge use of AI analogs to simulate complex lab environments, significantly boosting drug discovery efforts. He envisions a future where AI designs personalized medicine at scale, urging more researchers to embrace this transformative technology and tackle pressing challenges in science and beyond.
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From PhD Struggle To Billion Years Saved
- Max Jaderberg describes his PhD work and a friend who spent a PhD experimentally finding a single protein structure.
- He contrasts that with AlphaFold, which now predicts structures in seconds, saving over a billion years of research time.
AI Analog Paradigm Is Repeatable
- Jaderberg argues breakthroughs will repeat because architectures, data modalities and scaling infrastructure exist now.
- New measurement methods will keep creating larger datasets to train richer models.
AI As The Right Abstraction For Biology
- Biology resists analytic formulas but AI can learn implicit rules from recorded cellular data.
- Neural networks can act as the abstraction layer to model complex cellular dynamics.