10322,uh the physics simulation engine that's that's often used for robotics research
10328,and so on so i think that's a pretty gangster move uh so what what's the
10333,what's i mean this uh very few companies or people would do
10338,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
10344,that was the maximum benefit to humanity to do that and and the scientific community in one case the robotics uh
10351,physics community with mojoco so purchased it we purchased to obs we purchased it for the express
10357,principle to open source it so um so you know i hope people appreciate that
10402,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
10408,uh would not it was not able to cope with supporting it anymore because it was it got too big for him his amazing
10414,professor uh who who built it in the first place so we helped him out with that and then with alpha folds even
10419,bigger i would say and i think in that case we decided that there were so many downstream applications of alpha fold um
10427,that we couldn't possibly even imagine what they all were so the best way to accelerate uh drug discovery and also
10434,fundamental research would be to to um give all that data away and and and the
10440,and the and the system itself um you know it's been so gratifying to see what people have done that within just one
10446,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
10454,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
10501,their proteins of interest we've seen amazing fundamental research done so a couple of weeks ago front
10508,cover there was a whole special issue of science including the front cover which had the nuclear pore complex on it which
10514,is one of the biggest proteins in the body the nuclear poor complex is a protein that governs all the nutrients
10519,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
10525,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
10532,to try and figure out that structure for decades and they have lots of you know experimental data but it's too low
10537,resolution there's bits missing and they were able to like a giant lego jigsaw puzzle use alpha fold predictions plus
10544,experimental data and combined those two independent sources of information uh actually four different groups around
10550,the world were able to put it together the sec more or less simultaneously using alpha fault predictions so that's
ID,Texts
10556,been amazing to see and pretty much every pharma company every drug company executive i've spoken to has said that
10601,their teams are using alpha fold to accelerate whatever drugs uh uh they're
10606,trying to discover so i think the knock-on effect has been enormous in terms of uh the impact that uh
10614,alpha-fold has made and it's probably bringing in it's creating biologists it's bringing more people into the field
10619,um both on the excitement and both on the technical skills involved and um
10625,it's almost like uh a gateway drug to biology yes it is you get more computational people involved too
10631,hopefully and and i think for us you know the next stage as i said you know in future we have to have other
10637,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
10644,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
10649,resources and impact behind it in other ways some other projects will do non-profit style um and also we have to
10656,consider for future things as well safety and ethics as well like but you know synthetic biology there are you
10702,know there is dual use and we have to think about that as well with alpha fold we you know we consulted with 30
10707,different bioethicists and and other people expert in this field to make sure it was safe before um we released it so
10713,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
10720,community so i'm pretty sure that something like alpha fold
10725,uh would be part of nobel prizes in the future but us humans of course are horrible
10731,with credit assignment so we'll of course give it to the humans do you think there will be a day
10737,when ai system can't be denied that it earned that nobel prize do you
10745,think we'll see that in 21st century it depends what type of ais we end up building right whether they're um
10752,you know goal seeking agents who specifies the goals uh who comes up with the hypotheses
10757,who you know who determines which problems to tackle right so i think it's about an announcement yeah so it's
10802,announcing the results exactly as part of it um so i think right now of course it's it's it's it's amazing human
10810,ingenuity that's behind these systems and then the system in my opinion is just a tool you know it'd be a bit like
10815,saying with galileo and his telescope you know the ingenuity the the the credit should go to the telescope i mean
10821,it's clearly galileo building the tool which he then uses so i still see that in the same way
10826,today even though these tools learn for themselves um they're i think i think of things like alpha fold and that the
10833,things we're building as the ultimate tools for science and for acquiring new knowledge to help us as scientists
10839,acquire new knowledge i think one day there will come a point where an ai system may solve or come up with
10846,something like general relativity of its own bat not just by averaging everything on the internet or
10852,averaging everything on pubmed although that would be interesting to see what that would come up with um so