Google, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars it makes each year from its online search business, has long pursued giant research projects that could one day change the world.
On Wednesday, the Nobel Prize committee awarded significant prestige to Google’s pursuit of big ideas. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s main artificial intelligence lab, and John Jumper, one of the lab’s scientists, were among three researchers who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their efforts to better understand the human body and combat diseases through artificial intelligence.
The two Google scientists won their Nobels a day after Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google vice president and researcher, was one of two winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence.
The Nobel Prizes were a testament to the growing role artificial intelligence is playing in areas far beyond the traditional world of high-tech industry, and a reminder of Silicon Valley’s influence in nearly every corner of science and economics.
“This is the year the Nobel committee got artificial intelligence,” said Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Washington. “These awards are a conscious recognition of how influential artificial intelligence has become in the scientific world.”
But the triumphant moment for Google was tempered by concerns that the commercial success that has allowed the company to pursue these long-term projects is under threat from antitrust regulators. The Nobel prizes also raised concerns that the tech industry is not paying enough attention to the consequences of its unbridled pursuit of building more powerful AI systems.
“We may find ourselves in a situation where not only the solutions, but even the questions asked are provided by artificial intelligence,” said Mohammed AlQuraishi, a biologist at Columbia University. “It will be very interesting to navigate as scientists and as people.”
On Tuesday night, the Justice Department said it could ask a federal court to force Google to shut down parts of the company or change the way it operates in order to end its monopoly on online search.
Google is also facing the Justice Department in federal court in Virginia over allegations it violated antitrust laws to dominate the technology that places ads on websites. Final hearings in that case are expected next month. And on Monday, a federal judge in California ordered Google to allow other companies to put app stores on its Android operating system for three years as part of a third antitrust case.
Google isn’t the only big tech company under pressure from regulators. The Justice Department has also sued Apple, alleging that the company makes it difficult for customers to abandon its line of devices and software. The Federal Trade Commission has filed lawsuits against Meta, saying it foreclosed competition when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp. and Amazon, alleging that the company’s practices artificially inflate the prices of products online.
As the biggest tech companies battle concerns about monopolistic behavior, they’re going all-in on artificial intelligence — so much so that regulators say the companies need to rein in now before they use their power to take control of the young AI market intelligence systems.
“Artificial intelligence is coming to chemistry and going to Washington,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. “You may not care about AI, but AI cares about you.”
In its court filing Tuesday, the Justice Department said it believes any efforts to curb Google’s search monopoly should take into account its ability to “leverage its monopoly power to power artificial intelligence features.”
The Justice Department said it is considering asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which in August agreed with the government that Google abused its search monopoly, to take steps to limit Google’s power in new technology, including the ability for websites to opt out of the use of their content in the development of Google’s artificial intelligence systems.
The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department reached a separate settlement this year that paves the way to investigate other companies focused on developing artificial intelligence. The Justice Department has launched an investigation into Nvidia, which makes computer chips essential to the technology, while the FTC will be responsible for investigating Microsoft and its partner, San Francisco company OpenAI.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems.)
In the early 1960s, when computer science was emerging as a field, the standard set was that any academic discipline with “science” in its name was not one. A computer, the skeptics said, was a simple tool like a test tube or a microscope.
But as technology has advanced, accelerated by recent advances in artificial intelligence, computer science has become the driving force behind breakthroughs in all sciences—astronomy, biology, chemistry, medicine, and physics.
“Chatbots are how most people know about artificial intelligence, but the technology’s ability to accelerate scientific discovery is far more important,” said Mr Brynjolfsson.
After OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, sparking an AI boom across the industry, some researchers have raised concerns about how the technology could be used.
Dr. Hinton left Google, using his retirement as an opportunity to speak freely about his concern that the race to artificial intelligence could one day be disastrous. He said on Tuesday that he hoped “having the Nobel Prize could mean that people will take me more seriously”.
Leading researchers such as Dr. Hassabis, often describe artificial intelligence as a way to cure disease, fight climate change and solve other scientific mysteries that have long vexed the world’s researchers. The Nobel-winning work was an important step in that direction.
DeepMind, Google’s main artificial intelligence lab, has created technology called AlphaFold that can quickly and reliably predict the physical shape of proteins – the tiny mechanisms that guide the behavior of the human body and all living things. By identifying protein structures, scientists can more quickly develop drugs and vaccines and tackle other scientific problems.
In 2012, Dr. Hinton, then a professor at the University of Toronto, published a research paper with two of his graduate students that demonstrated the power of an AI technology called a neural network. Google paid $44 million to bring them to the company.
About a year later, Google paid $650 million for the four-year-old start-up of Dr. Hassabis, DeepMind, which specialized in the same kind of technology. Dr. Hinton and Dr. Hassabis were part of a small academic community that had cultivated neural networks for years while the rest of the world had largely ignored it.
Dr. Hinton, 76, liked to call Dr. Hassabis, 48, his “big postdoc” because he had supervised the postdoctoral work of the academic who later supervised Dr. Hassabis.
Dr. Hassabis also worries that AI could cause a number of problems or even threaten humanity if not carefully controlled. But he believes staying with a company is the best way to make sure its AI doesn’t cause problems.
A Google spokeswoman, Jane Park, said in a statement on Wednesday: “As a field, we must proceed with cautious optimism and engage in a conversation with the wider society about the risks in order to mitigate them and unlock the incredible ability of artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery”.
When Google acquired DeepMind, Dr. Hassabis and his co-founders sought assurances that Google would not use DeepMind’s technologies for military purposes and that it would create an independent board that would work to ensure that its technologies were not misused.
“Of course it’s a dual-purpose technology,” Dr. Hassabis said during a press conference after winning the Nobel Prize. “It has great potential for good, but it can also be used for evil.”
Teddy Rosenbluth contributed to the report.