DeepMind Says AI Is the Microscope of the Future That Could End Disease

“The next big frontier for us is going to be disease,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, in an April 20 interview with 60 Minutes. In a wide-ranging conversation with correspondent Scott Pelley, Hassabis said that artificial intelligence will soon help doctors diagnose illnesses earlier, predict conditions before they occur, and in some cases, prevent them entirely. “There’s a good chance we could cure many diseases, or prevent them entirely,” he said. “And this may happen within the next decade with AI.”

AlphaFold’s 2021 release was widely considered a breakthrough in structural biology, and according to Hassabis, the system has since predicted the shape of over 200 million proteins, the full set of known proteins on Earth.

“That’s every protein known to science,” Hassabis said. “It would’ve taken a billion years of PhD time to work out all those structures experimentally.” He argued that this foundational model has set the stage for more ambitious interventions, including the modeling of disease mechanisms and therapeutic pathways. “AI is now becoming the microscope of the future,” he said.

DeepMind originally published AlphaFold’s research in Nature and released the code and dataset freely, a move that was widely praised by the scientific community. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, built in collaboration with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), now includes more than 200 million structures covering proteins from humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and other organisms.