Getting into AI
Alex Antic: How does a chemical physicist end up becoming an expert in AI?
Charles Martin: I think that people may not realize that AI was invented by theoretical chemists. John Hopfield was a theoretical chemist. He invented one of the most famous neural networks, called the Hopfield associative memory network, and he was a theoretical chemist and sometimes a physicist. My advisor recently worked on something you may know called AlphaFold. He and his student John Jumper developed AlphaFold. What happened was that Google/DeepMind hired Jumper, and then they took his thesis work and souped it up.
There’s a long history of doing AI and theoretical chemistry.
I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and when I left my postdoc, I went off and worked with my graduate advisor’s son-in-law, who had a start-up called E-self. It was a personalized search engine, and that’s how I got into NLP, because we applied techniques from AI to try...