Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, made a bold claim during a CBS’ 60 Minutes interview that artificial intelligence could potentially end all diseases within the next decade.
According to Hindustan Times, Hassabis discussed how AI could revolutionize human health by dramatically reducing drug development time and leveraging AI’s advanced capabilities in analyzing protein structures, which is crucial for creating new medicines.
Current Drug Development Challenges
Creating new medicines traditionally takes about 10-15 years and costs around ₹216 crore ($2.6 billion). The long process involves many steps from early research to testing on people. Most new drugs—about 90%—fail during testing, which makes the whole process even more expensive and time-consuming.
| Comparison | Traditional Methods | AI-Powered Methods |
|---|---|---|
| Time needed | 10-15 years | Potentially weeks/months |
| Protein structures analyzed | 170,000 over decades | 200 million in one year |
| Accuracy level | Variable | 50% more accurate |
Understanding Protein Folding
Proteins are tiny machines in our bodies that must fold into specific shapes to work properly. Think of them like origami paper that must be folded exactly right. Before AI, scientists needed years to figure out just one protein shape using special equipment.
Google’s AI system called AlphaFold has changed everything by figuring out how 200 million proteins fold in just 18 months. Before this breakthrough, scientists had only mapped about 170,000 protein structures over many decades using a method called X-ray crystallography (a technique that uses X-rays to see protein shapes).
How AI Could Transform Medicine
- Faster drug creation: Reducing development from years to possibly weeks
- Better understanding of diseases at the molecular level
- Lower costs for making new medicines
- More accurate predictions about which drugs will work
- Better patient selection for testing new medicines
Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity AI’s CEO, and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s CEO, have also highlighted AI’s potential to transform healthcare. The technology could help scientists understand diseases better and find treatments much faster than ever before.
If these predictions come true, we might see a world where diseases that currently have no cure could be solved within our lifetime. While this seems ambitious, the remarkable speed of AI advancement suggests that Hassabis’s vision of ending all diseases might not be as far-fetched as it first appears.
