News Summary

• Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind were awarded part of the Nobel in chemistry for their neural network AlphaFold.
• It predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins by learning from thousands of experimentally measured shapes.
• A wave of startups building foundation models for biology, chemistry, and materials discovery raised billions of dollars, buoyed by DeepMind’s success.
• But for most open questions in science, we will need a different plan, at least in the short term.