8 results
AlphaFold solved the protein folding problem in 2020 at near-experimental accuracy, earning Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Its database now contains 200M+ protein structures, actively accelerating drug development and materials science.
Hassabis's preference for 'hard questions' isn't a personality quirk — it's a research strategy: choose problems that unlock large amounts of downstream value when solved, not problems easy enough to publish quickly. This strategy is the core reason DeepMind keeps breaking through at the scientific frontier.
DeepMind's core strategy under Demis Hassabis: use game environments (which have clear evaluation functions) to train general reasoning capabilities, then apply the same approach to scientific problems with evaluation functions. AlphaFold, AlphaGeometry, AlphaDev, and GNoME are concrete implementations of this strategy.
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) is one of the most discussed paths to AGI, but in reality AI self-improvement remains bounded by training data limits, evaluator reliability, and alignment problems. In 2026, AI can improve task-specific prompts and code, but there are clear technical barriers to 'true' RSI.
NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T N1 is the first genuinely open humanoid robot foundation model. Its dual-system architecture — a VLM for high-level reasoning plus a Diffusion Transformer for precise motion control — lets a single model run across multiple robot hardware platforms.
NVIDIA Lyra 2.0 generates geometrically consistent, indefinitely explorable 3D worlds from a single image. Its geometry-guided frame retrieval solves spatial forgetting and temporal drift while preserving generation quality — released open source under Apache 2.0 in April 2026.
AI video generation has been plagued by temporal drift and forgetting for years. In 2025, FramePack, Mixture of Contexts, and A2RD introduced systematic solutions that make long-form video generation genuinely viable.
Sakana AI's God Simulator uses neural cellular automata to let users act as the rule-setter for a digital ecosystem, revealing how incentive structures drive cooperation, collapse, and everything in between.