Reporter: Zheng Yuhang Intern reporter: Yue Chupeng Editor: Wang Jiaqi, Lan Suying
In this year's Nobel Prize, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has become the big winner.
On October 8, local time, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the foundational discoveries and inventions in the field of machine learning. The next day, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to protein design and protein structure prediction, half of which went to two scientists at Google's DeepMind.
These two awards bring AI research to the highest honor in the scientific community. For a while, there were many questions about "physics no longer exists" and "is the end of chemistry a computer".
Does this mean that the Nobel Prize will enter the "AI era"? One can't help but wonder if AI will one day win the Nobel Prize on its own. In the case of the gradual loss of scientific research positions, can the Nobel Prize in Literature preserve the last dignity of human beings?
Physics prize "upset": "Outsider" won
The Royal Sweden Academy of Sciences announced on October 8 local time that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of AI", and John Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, in recognition of their fundamental discoveries and inventions in machine learning using artificial neural networks.
Image source: Nobel Prize Committee X platform account
After the winners were announced, the outside world instantly "exploded": how could an achievement that does not seem to belong to any branch of traditional physics win the award? Does physics not exist? What does the Physics Prize have to do with AI?
Although the Nobel Prize committee members explained that artificial neural networks are trained with physical tools. However, the voices of incomprehension are still wave after wave.
Noah Giansiracusa, a professor of mathematics at Bentley University, said: "His [Hinton's] achievement is amazing, but is this physics? I don't think so. Even when they were inspired by physics, they did not develop new theories of physics or solve long-standing problems in physics. ”
Andrew Lensen, a senior lecturer in AI at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, is also puzzled. "We already have the Turing Prize, and I'd like to see the Nobel Prize awarded to someone who has contributed to the physics community," he said. It feels like the committee may have been drawn to the AI hype. ”
However, some scholars expressed their understanding, saying that this highlights the intersection and interoperability of cutting-edge disciplines, and the paradigm of traditional scientific research is changing.
Charlotte Dean, executive chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation Agency and professor of structural bioinformatics at the University of Oxford, said it was exciting to be able to work in science today, especially in these interdisciplinary areas, because AI is not only starting to solve really difficult problems, but also changing the way we do science.
Twenty-four hours later, AI won another chemistry prize
Twenty-four hours after the Physics Prize was awarded, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced, and AI once again won the favor of the Nobel Prize Committee.
The award was split in two, with one half going to David Baker for his "computer-based protein design" and the other half to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google's DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, senior research scientist, for their "contributions to protein structure prediction." In 2020, Hassabis and Jamper released an AI model called AlphaFold 2, a revolutionary tool that uses AI technology to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins.
Image source: Nobel Prize Committee X platform account
The link between AI and breakthroughs in protein mapping is clear. AlphaFold is often mentioned in the predictions for this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, so it has not caused as much controversy as the Physics Prize.
But the result is still surprising, because the Nobel Prize is usually awarded to research decades old, after the results have been clearly assessed as "in the best interests of humanity." The award-winning AlphaFold 2 was released four years ago.
This is the most responsive in the history of the Nobel Prize, and it may also herald a shift in the thinking of the Nobel Prize Committee. When asked by reporters in attendance whether the Nobel Prize in Chemistry committee considered the relevance of AI when judging nominees, the committee insisted that the decision was made purely based on science.
Will the Nobel Prize be fully "AI"?
The win-win situation of AI in the Nobel Prize marks the recognition of the important position of AI in scientific research, and also raises people's thinking about the nature of science and the future development direction: will the AI award change the fundamental nature of scientific research? Will the Nobel Prize fully shift to AI in the future? Will AI one day win the Nobel Prize on its own?
Focus 1: Will AI "kill" basic science exploration?
For a long time, the Nobel Prize honored advances in the field of pure science – discoveries based on the laws of nature and physical phenomena. Now, the lines between science and technology are blurring, and AI researchers are being recognized for building tools that impact the way humans approach and solve scientific problems.
Some people believe that the Nobel Prize's award of the medal to AI with such fanfare this year will only make researchers more enthusiastic about the research of tools and ignore the most basic theoretical exploration.
Peter Bentley, a professor of computer science at the University of London, stressed in an interview with the Daily Economic News that AI is more like a part of the problem than a solution to the problem in some things.
Matt Hodgkinson, an expert at the United Kingdom's Office for Research Integrity, said: "Winning a Nobel Prize with AI may be just a ship that sets sail, but it will influence the direction of research. Hodgkinson worries that when researchers try to reverse-engineer why they won this year's award, they will focus more on technology than science.
Julian Togelius, a professor of computer science at New York University, argues: "Scientists often choose the path of least resistance and the most cost-effective. "And that can hinder innovative thinking.
Nobel laureate Hassabistan said: "Nowadays, [AI research] is more engineering-focused, and we have a lot of technology now, and we are just improving the algorithms, not the brain," said Nobel laureate Hassabistan. ”
Image source: Visual China-VCG211158270552
Focus 2: The next field of AI "miracles" in medicine?
Will the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the last traditional science prize of the Nobel Prize, also be "conquered" by AI in the future?
In fact, medical research has always been one of the most important application areas of AI, and many studies rely on AI for analysis and prediction, such as virus identification, molecular modeling, drug development, and other tasks. At present, some teams have made important breakthroughs in exploring scientific problems through AI means.
On October 10, the world's top academic journal "Cell" published the scientific research results of the cooperation between Sun Yat-sen University and Alibaba Cloud, and the research team used cloud computing and AI technology to discover 180 supergroups and more than 160,000 new RNA viruses, nearly 30 times more than known virus species.
Using AI algorithms, the research team found more than 510,000 viral genomes in 10,487 RNA sequencing data from samples from global biological environments, representing more than 160,000 potential virus species and 180 RNA virus supergroups. Twenty-three of these superpopulations could not be identified by sequence homology methods. Through AI technology, this study discovered the "dark matter" of viruses that could not be discovered by traditional research methods, and explored a new path for virology research.
Technology companies led by Deepmind and OpenAI are also accelerating their development of the medical market, and their entry is bound to accelerate the progress of research and development in the medical field.
Earlier this year, DeepMind released AlphaFold 3, a model that successfully predicts the structure and interactions of all known proteins, DNA, RNA, and ligands with unprecedented precision. This leap promises to usher in a new era of AI cell biology.
Focus 3: Is the Literary Prize the "Last Bastion" of the Future of Mankind?
The position of scientific research is gradually "lost", will the Nobel Prize in Literature be the "last bastion" of mankind?
It has been argued that the core of literature lies in human creativity and individual expression, and that although AI is capable of mimicking human language and writing style, it lacks real emotional experience and creative process. Ted Kang, a well-known science fiction writer, published a long article in August this year asserting that AI does not create real art.
Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Four years after winning the Nobel Prize, he published Klara and the Sun. This novel tells the world through the eyes of a robot Clara, and reflects the problems faced by humans in the age of AI from another side.
Earlier this year, Japan female writer Rie Kudan's novel with ChatGPT assistance won the Wasagawa Award, Japan's top literary award. In her acceptance speech, she said that generative AI has helped her unleash her potential, and she sees AI as a source of inspiration and a companion in her creative process.
From literature about AI to literature about AI, AI has quietly touched the field of literature.
Write at the end
In the future, will AI replace scientists and writers as the protagonists of the Nobel Prize?
As early as 2021, Japan scientists started the Nobel Turing Challenge project, hoping to develop an AI that could independently win the Nobel Prize by 2050.
National Business Daily