Stockholm: Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing fields from finance to journalism, and scientists are now investigating whether AI might even win a Nobel Prize in the future. In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano proposed the "Nobel Turing Challenge," encouraging researchers to create an "AI scientist" capable of conducting autonomous research worthy of a Nobel Prize by 2050.

Ross King, a professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden, has already created robot scientists, starting with "Robot Scientist Adam" in 2009. Adam was the first machine to make scientific discoveries independently, generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and testing them. Though Adam's findings on yeast were modest, they demonstrated that AI can contribute to science. A second robot, "Eve," was developed to explore drug candidates for diseases like malaria.

Despite these advancements, experts agree that AI is not yet capable of producing Nobel-level breakthroughs. To reach that stage, AI would need to exhibit far greater intelligence and the ability to understand complex scientific problems holistically.

Inga Strumke, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, noted that while AI is already impacting science, it is not likely to replace human scientists anytime soon. However, AI tools like AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, have already achieved groundbreaking feats—such as predicting protein structures that were previously beyond human capacity. This work has put AlphaFold’s creators, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis, on the radar for potential Nobel Prizes, although Nobel recognition often comes decades after the initial discovery.

David Pendlebury, head of the analytics group Clarivate, predicts that Nobel-winning research aided by AI could be awarded within the next decade, acknowledging AI's growing role in scientific breakthroughs. While AI is unlikely to win a Nobel on its own soon, it is poised to become an integral tool in Nobel-worthy discoveries.