Timeline

2010

Understanding different aspects of intelligence

DeepMind was founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa

Suleyman. Their goal was to create a general-purpose AI that would be useful and effective for almost anything. In 2014, the company joined forces with Google to accelerate its work, while continuing its own research agenda.

2016

Creating a team

In March 2016, the strongest Go player in the world, Lee Sedol, sat down for a game against Google DeepMind’s AI program, AlphaGo. The program defeated him and demonstrated that DeepMind’s AI techniques were potentially advanced enough to be applied to scientific challenges including the “protein-folding problem”. Shortly after, DeepMind established a small team to begin work on protein structure prediction.

2018

The first public test of AlphaFold

2018 saw DeepMind’s AlphaFold win the 13th Critical Assessment of Techniques for

Protein Structure Predictions (CASP), successfully predicting the most accurate structure for 25 out of 43 proteins. The methods were then published in the scientific journal Nature, the team was expanded, and work began on an innovative new system.

THE CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF ALPHAFOLD

We take a look at the development of AlphaFold, an AI program that accurately predicts the shape of proteins, and will help scientists understand the biological processes of every living thing.

2020

Providing a solution

AlphaFold2 won CASP14 by a considerable margin and was recognised as a solution to the 50-year-old “protein-folding problem” by the organisers of CASP. It predicted structures down to atomic accuracy with a median error (RMSD_95) of less than 1 Angstrom.

THE CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF ALPHAFOLD

We take a look at the development of AlphaFold, an AI program that accurately predicts the shape of proteins, and will help scientists understand the biological processes of every living thing.

2021

Opening up to the scientific community

In 2021, DeepMind – in partnership with The European

Bioinformatics Institute – launched its AlphaFold Protein Structure

Database.This gave the scientific community free and open access to the human proteome, along with another 20 model organisms – over 350,000 structures in total.

2022

Continuous growth of the database

In the latest development, DeepMind has expanded the AlphaFold Protein

Structure Database from nearly 1 million to over 200 million structures, including predictions for most proteins in UniProt. Over 300,000 researchers worldwide have made use of the database to date.