3 December 2025

2:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Amphi Petit Kursaal

Hugues Bersini

Hugues Bersini is Professor of Computer Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Director of the IRIDIA artificial intelligence laboratory at the same university. He is the founder of the Brussels-based FARI Institute of AI for the common goods. He is the author of some fifteen books on information technology and complex systems – including “Object Programming”, “The Foundations of Computer Science” and “Introduction to Web Development”, which have become university authorities – and two collections of short stories: “Le Tamagotchi de Mme Yen” and “Le Dernier Fado de l’Androïd”. His research work, which has appeared in hundreds of publications, covers artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, software engineering, complex systems and cognitive science. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.

Could an autonomous AI win the next Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

New AI models, such as deep networks and LLMs, are all the more intelligent and capable of abstraction the more they tackle narrow semantic universes such as programming, mathematics and the more exact sciences in general. It’s almost as if they’re being rushed from the outset: the more constrained the fields they tackle at the outset, the better they’ll fare, the more they’ll be able to induce the concepts that will enable them to best navigate these fields, and best predict the information that characterizes them, in an increasingly autonomous way. The narrower their base, the greater their height. In 2024, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Demis Hassabis of Deep Mind for his development of AphaFold, which “discovered” one of the missing pieces in the prediction of protein folding from their amino acid sequence. A great deal of human knowledge has gone into this prediction, from the central dogma of molecular biology to the exploitation of numerous databases built up over decades of research and development by human biologists. Will an AI emancipated from this decisive human input, from these laboratory results, be able to win the next Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the years to come?