The Download: Another Nobel Prize for AI, and Adobe’s anti-scraping tool

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has won a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry for using artificial intelligence to predict the structures of proteins. Hassabis shares half the prize with John M. Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, while the other half has been awarded to David Baker, a professor in biochemistry at the University of Washington for his work on computational protein design.

The potential impact of this research is enormous. Proteins are fundamental to life, but understanding what they do involves figuring out their structure—a very hard puzzle that once took months or years to crack for each type of protein.

By cutting down the time it takes to predict a protein’s structure, computational tools such as those developed by this year’s award winners are helping scientists gain a greater understanding of how proteins work and opening up new avenues of research and drug development. The technology could unlock more efficient vaccines, speed up research for the cure to cancer, or lead to completely new materials.

It also marks a second Nobel win for AI, after computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics for his foundational contributions to deep learning. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

David Baker spoke to MIT Technology Review in 2022 about his work. Check out what he had to say about the revolutionary technology.

Adobe wants to make it easier for artists to blacklist their work from AI scraping

The news: Adobe has announced a new tool to help creators watermark their artwork and opt out of having it used to train generative AI models.

How it works: The web app, called Adobe Content Authenticity, allows artists to signal that they do not consent for their work to be used by AI models, which are generally trained on vast databases of content scraped from the internet. It also gives creators the opportunity to add what Adobe is calling “content credentials,” including their verified identity, social media handles, or other online domains, to their work.

Why it matters: Adobe’s relationship with the artistic community is complicated. While it says that it doesn’t (and won’t) train its AI on user content, many artists have argued that the company doesn’t actually obtain consent or own the rights to individual contributors’ images. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams