Ruth Porat, Google’s President and Chief Investment Officer, says that the world is going through a time of incredible scientific and technological change. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting much better than chatbots and may even be able to help cure cancer.
Porat spoke at the Fortune Global Forum on Sunday with C.S. Venkatakrishnan, the CEO of Barclays Group, and Khalid Al-Falih, the Minister of Investment for Saudi Arabia. She was quite hopeful that AI may lead to new ideas in science, economics, and society.
Porat spoke to a global audience and said, “We are all lucky to live at this time in history because of the chance AI gives us.”
AI: Not Just Chatbots
Porat said that AI is not just a new technology, but also a force for change that can change whole industries, drive global prosperity, and speed up human progress.
“People are playing with AI through chatbots, which is great because it gets you started on the journey.” But the next question is, what does it mean for my country? What does this mean for my business? “She asked.”
She said that people don’t always realize how much AI will really change things, especially because there have already been big advances in health and science.
DeepMind’s AlphaFold: A Game-Changer in Finding New Drugs
Porat said that Google’s AI research group DeepMind and its open-source AlphaFold project, which predicts protein structures in 3D, were “the greatest contribution to drug discovery in our lifetime.”
Fortune says that experts in more than 190 nations have utilized AlphaFold’s data to speed up research into ailments that were thought to be too complicated to treat.
Porat talked about how AI is becoming more important in early diagnosis, especially for finding cancer, which is still one of the biggest problems in modern medicine.
“We all know that getting a diagnosis early can mean the difference between life and death or how hard the treatment will be.” “Finding these metastatic cells early is like finding a needle in a haystack, but AI can do it,” she said.
She was sure of her conclusion,
“We should be able to cure cancer before we die.”
Isomorphic Labs with DeepMind: Speeding Up Drug Discovery
DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI units, are looking on ways to speed up the process of making new drugs.
In September, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, told Bloomberg TV that AI might soon decrease the time it takes to create drugs from years to only months.
“I’d like to see that cut down to a few months instead of years in the next few years.” Hassabis, who has also won a Nobel Prize, stated, “That’s what I think is possible, maybe even faster.”
He said that DeepMind is already working on a better version of AlphaFold that can understand how proteins interact with each other and help find new ways to cure cancer and disorders that affect the immune system.
The Big Picture
Ruth Porat’s comments show that more and more tech leaders around the world agree that AI will change the future of medicine by giving us tools to anticipate, find, and treat complicated diseases faster and more correctly than ever before.
As AI gets better, the world may be on the verge of a medical revolution that might make the impossible aim of treating cancer a reality.