The Journey of Artificial Intelligence Redrawing the Map of Humanity: The Thinking Game and AlphaFold

On April 27th, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, visited Korea — exactly ten years after AlphaGo's historic match against Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016. On the occasion of this visit, Google announced plans to establish a Google AI Campus in Seoul before the end of this year, making it the first of its kind outside the United Kingdom, where Google DeepMind's headquarters is located. The Ministry of Science and ICT signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with CEO Hassabis, covering joint research in science and technology AI, AI talent development, and the responsible use of AI. As I followed this news with growing interest in Hassabis, a documentary posted on YouTube caught my eye.

The Thinking Game is a documentary film that closely chronicles over five years of the journey of Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. The film illuminates his path from childhood chess prodigy toward the sweeping dream of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the landmark achievement born along the way — AlphaFold — showing how AI can become a tool for solving humanity's most formidable challenges.

At the heart of the film lies the protein structure prediction problem, long regarded as the holy grail of biology. Determining the three-dimensional structure of a protein — which governs its function — from its amino acid sequence alone had been an unsolved problem that scientists around the world had grappled with for fifty years. Hassabis and the DeepMind team brought a new lens to this challenge: artificial intelligence. This breakthrough, which compressed work that once took months into mere minutes, accelerated the pace of biotechnology by orders of magnitude. It was not merely a technological triumph — it was a scientific revolution that transformed the very way we understand the origins of disease, develop new drugs, and engineer plastic-degrading enzymes. This achievement ultimately bore fruit in the form of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, proving to the world that AI is a powerful partner in expanding the frontiers of human knowledge.

As the pace of AI development accelerates, so too do concerns about its applications. Yet as long as companies like Anthropic — founded with AI safety as its foremost priority — and Hassabis's Google DeepMind, dedicated to scientific discovery for the universal good of humanity, continue their work, the future of AI need not be a dark one. Hassabis defines AI as a tool that amplifies intelligence itself — a fundamental force — and through it, he envisions an era in which all of humanity benefits: from solving the climate crisis and conquering incurable diseases to maximizing energy efficiency.

When the film ends, one naturally comes face to face with a weighty question. Even if we are not brilliant developers like Hassabis, what can we do for a better future for humanity? My answer is this: cultivate the power of asking questions. AlphaFold as an answer began with Hassabis's relentless question about solving protein structure. The machine may find the answers, but the value-driven question of which problems are worth solving is one that only humans can pose.

In the end, The Thinking Game is a hymn to the miracles that emerge when human curiosity meets technology. If we set the direction of technology rightly and never stop asking questions in service of humanity, the future we share with AI will be nothing less than a new Renaissance in human history.

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