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Isomorphic Labs, the four-year old drug discovery start-up owned by Google parent Alphabet, will have an artificial intelligence-designed drug in trials by the end of this year, says its founder Sir Demis Hassabis.
“We’re looking at oncology, cardiovascular, neurodegeneration, all the big disease areas, and I think by the end of this year, we’ll have our first drug,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times at the World Economic Forum.
“It usually takes an average of five to 10 years [to discover] one drug. And maybe we could accelerate that 10 times, which would be an incredible revolution in human health,” said Hassabis, who received the Nobel Prize for chemistry with his colleague John Jumper and biochemist David Baker in October.
Isomorphic was spun out of Google’s AI research arm Google DeepMind in 2021, but remains a wholly owned subsidiary of its parent company, Alphabet. The start-up’s potential has attracted big pharmaceutical partners, which are keen to lower expenses and boost efficiency of the costly drug development process.
Hassabis previously told the FT his team was working on six drug development programmes with Eli Lilly and Novartis.
In a wide-ranging interview, Hassabis, who is also chief executive of Google DeepMind, said the search giant’s prototype of an AI assistant, known as Project Astra, will probably roll out to consumers later this year. He described a near future, within three years, when there are “billions” of AI agents, “negotiating with each other on behalf of the vendor and the customer” and said it would require a rethinking of the web itself.
He also called for more caution and co-ordination among leading AI developers competing to build artificial general intelligence. He warned the technology could threaten human civilisation if it runs out of control or is repurposed by “bad actors . . . for harmful ends”.
Google DeepMind’s ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence, or “a system that is capable of exhibiting all the cognitive capabilities that humans have”, according to Hassabis, who said that despite social media “hype” about it being close, true AGI was still five to 10 years away.
“If something’s possible and valuable to do, people will do it,” Hassabis said. “We’re past that point now with AI, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle . . . so we have to try and make sure to steward that into the world in as safe a way as possible.”
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