Nobel Prizes Give Google the Glow It Craves
The awards for AI leaders Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton lend the tech giant some much-needed credibility.
The laureates of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Photographer: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFPAn executive from a large technology firm has just won a Nobel. On Thursday, the top prize for chemistry went to the head of Alphabet Inc.’s AI efforts, Demis Hassabis, along with two other key scientists, for a years-long project that used artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins. The day before, Geoffrey Hinton, a former executive at Google who’s been called a godfather of AI, won the Nobel prize for physics along with physicist John Hopfield, for work on machine learning.
It seems the Nobel Foundation is eager to mark AI advancements — and the notion that key scientific problems can be solved computationally — as worthy of its coveted prizes. That will be a reputational boon for firms like Google and executives like Hassabis. But there’s a risk too that such recognition obscures concerns about both the technology itself and the increasing concentration of AI power in a handful of companies.