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

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has received a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry for utilizing synthetic intelligence to foretell the buildings of proteins. Hassabis shares half the prize with John M. Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, whereas the opposite half has been awarded to David Baker, a professor in biochemistry on the College of Washington for his work on computational protein design.

The potential affect of this analysis is gigantic. Proteins are elementary to life, however understanding what they do includes determining their construction—a really arduous puzzle that when took months or years to crack for every kind of protein.

By reducing down the time it takes to foretell a protein’s construction, computational instruments corresponding to these developed by this yr’s award winners are serving to scientists acquire a larger understanding of how proteins work and opening up new avenues of analysis and drug growth. The know-how may unlock extra environment friendly vaccines, pace up analysis for the remedy to most cancers, or result in utterly new supplies.

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

—Melissa Heikkilä

David Baker spoke to MIT Expertise Assessment in 2022 about his work. Check out what he needed to say concerning the revolutionary know-how.

Adobe desires to make it simpler for artists to blacklist their work from AI scraping

The information: Adobe has introduced a brand new instrument to assist creators watermark their art work and decide out of getting it used to coach generative AI fashions.

The way it works: The online app, referred to as Adobe Content material Authenticity, permits artists to sign that they don’t consent for his or her work for use by AI fashions, that are typically educated on huge databases of content material scraped from the web. It additionally provides creators the chance so as to add what Adobe is asking “content material credentials,” together with their verified id, social media handles, or different on-line domains, to their work.

Why it issues: Adobe’s relationship with the creative neighborhood is difficult. Whereas it says that it doesn’t (and received’t) practice its AI on person content material, many artists have argued that the corporate doesn’t really get hold of consent or personal the rights to particular person contributors’ photos. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams