India's AI power in democratising expertise pushing scientific frontiers Google DeepMind senior exec

New Delhi, Mar 1 (PTI) India's biggest AI ‘opportunity unlock' is in democratising expertise at scale and advancing scientific frontiers, Pushmeet Kohli, Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind said, citing its transformative potential for 1.4 billion people, from expanding healthcare access to accelerating drug discovery.
    Kohli told PTI that India has exceptional talent and a strong education system that has produced outstanding researchers and engineers, many of whom are contributing to core AI development.
    He noted that Google DeepMind's Bengaluru lab has made fundamental contributions to foundational models and their applications of AI across critical sectors. Indian talent, he said, will play a vital role not only in advancing core machine learning and AI technologies but also in applying them to areas such as agriculture, healthcare and social systems.
    Describing the current moment in AI as "amazing", he said the focus has now shifted firmly to impact.
    Kohli, a distinguished scientist and senior executive at Google DeepMind - the advanced AI research arm of Google - said that beyond widening access, AI's role is in unlocking new treatments for diseases and accelerating drug discovery.
    The broader opportunity, he said, is to harness AI to tackle longstanding challenges while driving scientific breakthroughs.
    Kohli said AI can serve as a powerful "democratising force", helping expand access to high-quality and reliable healthcare, a persistent challenge for many countries worldwide.
    Google DeepMind - Since its founding in 2010 - has focused on using AI to accelerate scientific discovery, driving breakthroughs across biology, materials science, physics, climate science and mathematics. Core to its strategy is solving fundamental ‘root node' problems that unlock entire fields, exemplified by its protein-folding work, that earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
    "AI is ability for us to democratise expertise, to tackle problems that we have not been able to solve till now...democratising expertise, say, for high quality, reliable health care. This is a challenge that many countries are facing around the world, including India. How do we make sure that 1.4 billion Indians have access to high-quality healthcare? This is where AI comes in," he said.
    By delivering breakthroughs in medical sciences, strengthening agricultural support, and extending critical information to underserved communities, AI can help uplift society in meaningful ways, he said.
     AI can be a powerful force for unlocking knowledge and information about healthcare, and beyond that for agriculture, energy, and other areas, Kohli added.
    Highlighting AI's role in science, Kohli pointed to breakthroughs such as AlphaFold, which solved the long-standing challenge of protein structure prediction and opened new frontiers in biology. He said the tool has been widely democratised, with millions of researchers globally, including around 180,000 in India, using it to drive discoveries in medicine and crop science.
    The broader goal is to replicate such an impact across fields like material science, fusion energy and quantum computing.
    Google DeepMind's AlphaFold is an AI system that accurately predicts protein structures, solving a decades-old scientific challenge and accelerating breakthroughs in biology, drug discovery and life sciences research worldwide.
    Kohli said AlphaFold has so far had a significant impact among AI-for-science applications and advancements, citing its use by 3.3 million researchers as evidence of both scale and real-world relevance.
    "There are 180,000 Indian researchers who are using this AI model to find new cures, to figure out and develop new crops that can be resistant to disease. There are so many things Indian researchers are doing with that technology," he said.
    Beyond "revolutionising" biology, the power of the technology is being replicated in other fields - from material science to enabling quantum computing.
    Looking ahead, he said AI for science is now moving into the era of ‘AI agents' - systems designed to help researchers tackle complex problems across disciplines, from biology and material science to many other fields - marking an "exciting" new phase in the technology's evolution.
    "If you look at what science is, where AI is going and where AI for science is going, what we are seeing is that we now are entering the world of AI agents, which are really helping scientists solve difficult problems across the whole spectrum of different topics, not just biology, not just in material science, (but) many, many different things. And so that's also very exciting sort of thing that is emerging in AI today," he said.
     Kohli said AI's impact will span multiple domains, broadly enhancing human productivity. He noted that the technology will expand access to deep expertise in areas such as healthcare and other specialised fields, while science is set to become one of its most significant applications.
    AI, he said, enables scientists to better leverage vast datasets and reason with them to generate new insights. Drawing a parallel with AlphaGo's historic move 37' - initially seen as a mistake but later recognised as a breakthrough - Kohli said similar transformative moments are likely to emerge across biology, chemistry, energy and climate science, marking a pivotal phase in AI-driven discovery.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; AlphaGo was an AI system developed by Google DeepMind that defeated world champion Lee Sedol in 2016 in the board gameGo'.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)