MC EXCLUSIVE AI's biggest potential is in democratization of science: Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli

Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind with Moneycontrol's Nalin Mehta

• AI can democratize science by cutting costs and barriers for global researchers
• AlphaFold offers instant protein structure analysis, benefiting many scientists.
• AI aids vaccine, treatment development, and global problem-solving.

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Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, said that AI’s biggest potential lies in its ability to democratize science — cutting costs, time and barriers that once kept cutting-edge research out of reach for scientists in much of the world.

In an interview with Moneycontrol's Managing Editor, Dr Nalin Mehta, Pushmeet Kohli said, "AI's biggest potential is in the democratization of science. If you think, I mean, go back to the example of AlphaFold, to understand the structure of one protein, it used to take almost five years and multiple millions of dollars, right? You had to take the protein, synthesize it, purify it, crystallize it, then sort of send it to a synchrotron, get a diffraction pattern, and then you will find the structure. A researcher working in India or sort of Latin America or Africa working on a tropical disease never had access to a structural understanding of the proteins that they really want to study."

"And now all of that millions of dollars and multiple years has been transformed into one click. So you go to the AlphaFold database, you put in your sort of protein, and you get the structure out. And that transformation, that acceleration, that democratization is what sort of is a perfect example of what AI can bring to science and to the world in various different domains," he told Moneycontrol.

AlphaFold is a Nobel Prize-winning AI model for protein structures.

Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli explains why India is in perfect position to leverage AI | Read full Q&A

When asked where has AI delivered the most unreasonable progress for want of a better world, Kohli said, "I'm really partial to science, like I lead the science and strategic initiatives unit at Google DeepMind. And one of the very first projects that we started almost eight years back was on using AI for this amazing problem of protein structure predictions. Now, proteins are the building blocks of life. These are the Lego blocks that make you and me. And understanding their function and shape is an incredibly important sort of problem to tackle if you want to develop new treatments for diseases and so on. And our AI model AlphaFold made a major breakthrough at the height of the pandemic, in fact, in 2020, when we released AlphaFold 2. And since then, it has been used by 3.3 million researchers across the world."

"People have been sort of using it from developing better vaccines to coming up with new treatments for neglected tropical diseases to coming up with enzymes that can deal with plastic pollution and making sort of breakthroughs in fundamental biology. So, you can see the real impact that this kind of technology can have over a large spectrum of applications," he said.