DEMIS. I think there’s going to be some amazing advances in biology built on top of things like alpha fold. We’re already seeing that with the community doing that after we’ve open sourced it and released it um and uh you know i also i often say that i think uh if you think of mathematics is the perfect description language for physics i think ai might be end up being the perfect description language for biology because biology is so messy it’s so emergent so dynamic and complex um i think i find it very hard to believe we’ll ever get to something as elegant as newton’s laws of motions to describe a cell right it’s just too complicated um so i think ai is the right tool for this you have to uh

LEX. you have to start at the basic building blocks and use ai to run the simulation for all those building blocks so have a very strong way to do prediction of what given these building blocks what kind of biology how the the function and the evolution of that biological system it’s almost like a cellular automata you have to run you can’t analyze it from a high level you have to take the basic ingredients figure out the rules yeah and let it run but in this case the rules are very difficult to figure out yes yes learn them

DEMIS. that’s exactly it so it’s the biology is too complicated to figure out the rules it’s it’s it’s too emergent too dynamic say compared to a physics system like the motion of a planet yeah right and and so you have to learn the rules and that’s exactly the type of systems that we’re building

—–
you mentioned you’ve open sourced alpha fold and even the data involved Open sourcing AlphaFold & MuJoCo to me personally also really happy and a big thank you for open sourcing mijoko uh the physics simulation engine that’s that’s often used for robotics research and so on so i think that’s a pretty gangster move uh so what what’s the what’s i mean this uh very few companies or people would do that kind of thing what’s the philosophy behind that you know it’s a case-by-case basis and in both those cases we felt that was the maximum benefit to humanity to do that and and the scientific community in one case the robotics uh physics community with mojoco so purchased it we purchased to obs we purchased it for the express principle to open source it so um so you know i hope people appreciate that it’s great to hear that you do and then the second thing was and mostly we did it because the person building it is uh uh would not it was not able to cope with supporting it anymore because it was it got too big for him his amazing professor uh who who built it in the first place so we helped him out with that and then with alpha folds even bigger i would say and i think in that case we decided that there were so many downstream applications of alpha fold um that we couldn’t possibly even imagine what they all were so the best way to accelerate uh drug discovery and also fundamental research would be to to um give all that data away and and and the and the and the system itself um you know it’s been so gratifying to see what people have done that within just one year which is a short amount of time in science and uh it’s been used by over 500 000 researchers have used it we think that’s almost every biologist in the world i think there’s roughly 500 000 biologists in the world professional biologists have used it to to look at their proteins of interest we’ve seen amazing fundamental research done so a couple of weeks ago front cover there was a whole special issue of science including the front cover which had the nuclear pore complex on it which is one of the biggest proteins in the body the nuclear poor complex is a protein that governs all the nutrients going in and out of your cell nucleus so they’re like little hole gateways that open and close to let things go in and out of your cell nucleus so they’re really important but they’re huge because they’re massive doughnut rings shaped things and they’ve been looking to try and figure out that structure for decades and they have lots of you know experimental data but it’s too low resolution there’s bits missing and they were able to like a giant lego jigsaw puzzle use alpha fold predictions plus experimental data and combined those two independent sources of information uh actually four different groups around the world were able to put it together the sec more or less simultaneously using alpha fault predictions so that’s been amazing to see and pretty much every pharma company every drug company executive i’ve spoken to has said that their teams are using alpha fold to accelerate whatever drugs uh uh they’re trying to discover so i think the knock-on effect has been enormous in terms of uh the impact that uh alpha-fold has made and it’s probably bringing in it’s creating biologists it’s bringing more people into the field um both on the excitement and both on the technical skills involved and um it’s almost like uh a gateway drug to biology yes it is you get more computational people involved too hopefully and and i think for us you know the next stage as i said you know in future we have to have other considerations too we’re building on top of alpha fold and these other ideas i discussed with you about protein protein interactions and and genomics and other things and not everything will be open source some of it will will do commercially because that will be the best way to actually get the most resources and impact behind it in other ways some other projects will do non-profit style um and also we have to consider for future things as well safety and ethics as well like but you know synthetic biology there are you know there is dual use and we have to think about that as well with alpha fold we you know we consulted with 30 different bioethicists and and other people expert in this field to make sure it was safe before um we released it so there’ll be other considerations in future but for right now you know i think alpha fold is a kind of a gift from us to to to the scientific community
—–
uh look beyond just science that’s why i think philosophy social sciences even theology other things like that come into it where um what you know arts and humanities what what does it mean to be human and the spirit of being human and and to enhance that and and the human condition right and allow us to experience things we could never experience before and improve the the overall human condition and humanity overall you know get radical abundance solve many scientific problems solve disease so this is the era i think this is the amazing era i think we’re heading into if we do it right um but we’ve got to be careful we’ve already seen with things like social media how dual use technologies can be misused by firstly by by by bad you know p bad actors or naive actors or crazy actors right so there’s that set of just the common or garden misuse of existing dual use technology and then of course there’s an additional uh uh thing that has to be overcome with ai that eventually it may have its own agency so it could be uh uh uh good or bad in in in of itself so i think these questions have to be approached very carefully um using the scientific method i would say in terms of hypothesis generation careful control testing not live a b testing out in the world because with powerful dual technologies like ai if something goes wrong it may cause you know a lot of harm before you can fix it um it’s not like a you know an imaging app or game app where you know that if if something goes wrong it’s relatively easy to fix and and the harm’s relatively small so i think it comes with you know the the the usual uh cliche of like with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility and i think that’s the case here with things like ai given the the enormous opportunity in front of us and i think we need a lot of voices uh and as many inputs into things like the design of the systems and the values they should have and what goals should they be put to um i think as wide a group of voices as possible beyond just the technologies is needed uh to input into that and to have a say in that especially when it comes to deployment of these systems which is when the rubber really hits the road it really affects the general person in the street rather than fundamental research and that’s why i say i think as a first step it would be better if we have the choice to build these systems as tools to give and i’m not saying that it should never they should never go beyond tools because of course the potential is there um for it to go way beyond just tools uh but um i think that would be a good first step in order for us to you know allow us to carefully experiment understand what these things can do so the leap between tool to sentient entity being is one should take very careful yes