Demis Hassabis · OpenAI · Gemini · Google · Elon Musk · MIT Technology Review
If that software, called WeatherNext, helped anyone escape the storm or better fortify their home
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The juxtaposition of Hassabis’ lofty rhetoric with the real-world results of WeatherNext highlighted the tension between two different approaches to AI for science.
Key facts
- MIT Technology Review's authoritative overview of the 10 technologies, emerging trends, bold ideas, and powerful movements in AI in 2026
- And Isomorphic Labs, a Google subsidiary that aims to use AlphaFold and related technologies to develop new drugs, raised a $2 billion Series B funding round
- According to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, AI is sprinting, and they're struggling to keep up
- Last month, the Los Angeles Times reported that Google fellow John Jumper, who won the Nobel for AlphaFold, is now working on AI coding, not on science-specific AI tools
Summary
During Tuesday’s Google the reporter/O keynote, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, proclaimed that they are currently “standing in the foothills of the singularity.” It was a striking statement—the singularity is the theoretical future moment when AI rapidly exceeds human intelligence and dramatically transforms the world. He was on stage to close out the session with a segment on scientific AI, the centerpiece of which was a video detailing how the company’s weather prediction software provided an advance alert about Hurricane Melissa’s catastrophic landfall in Jamaica last year—and potentially saved lives. This second vision powers a great deal of AI enthusiasm right now, including recent excitement around recursive self-improvement, or the idea that AI systems could eventually become the primary drivers of AI advancement—a process that would get faster and faster as the AI systems grow smarter.
This week, Pushmeet Kohli, Google Cloud’s chief scientist, published a piece in a special AI and science issue of the journal Daedalus, writing: “We are moving toward AI that doesn’t facilitate science but begins to do science.” With autonomous AI scientists on the horizon, it’s harder to justify massive efforts to develop super-specialized tools—even one like AlphaFold, for which DeepMind scientists won a Nobel Prize, or a potentially life-saving system like WeatherNext.