Google Racked Up 3 Nobel Prizes

[paserbyp]

Last week, Google is feeling like a person at a party trying to look like they're having fun after remembering they left their dog outside. Three researchers with links to Google won the Nobel Prize for their work on AI, cementing the company as an unequivocal leader in the technology at the same time that it’s under antitrust scrutiny from the Department Of Justice(DOJ).

Two of the three people who won the prize in chemistry—Demis Hassabis and John Jumper—are scientists of Google's AI lab, DeepMind. And Geoffrey Hinton, who was part of a duo that won the Nobel for physics, was a Google VP up until last year:

* Hassabis and Jumper won for their work using AI to decode proteins, enabling scientists to rapidly develop medicines and vaccines.

* Hinton won for his work on neural networks—the bedrock of AI systems like ChatGPT.

But these big wins prompted big questions about Big Tech’s increasing and potentially untenable role in scientific development.

That some of the world’s most prestigious scientific awards were given to private sector researchers reflects a paradigm shift—both in what the Nobel Prize committee deems important (clearly AI) and what the future of scientific research will look like.

The research accomplished at DeepMind required unbelievable amounts of computation power and data. Google is one of the only companies that could provide both of those things and bankroll the project.

In his acceptance speech, Hassabis said he wouldn’t have accomplished what he did without the “patience and a lot of support” that he got from Google.

Google is only as big and powerful as its most important businesses, and the DOJ said last week that it is considering asking a judge (who agreed that Google was a monopoly in search) to break up the company. The Justice Department also said it would consider Google’s “leverage of its monopoly power to feed AI” in deciding what to request.