From the Age of the Universe to a Few Weeks
Atoms and molecules are invisible to the human eye. With AI, researchers can now watch them move. That idea opens episode 8 of AI Backstage Stories, the video series from Google Germany, released on 20 October 2026. In the roughly eleven-minute conversation, Philipp Justus, Google’s Vice President for Central Europe, speaks with BIFOLD Co-Director Prof. Klaus-Robert Müller.
The conversation centres on the Schrödinger equation, which Müller calls “a real beast.” Even approximate solutions take hours of computing for a single molecule and months for a material. Müller’s team trained machines to predict the result of the equation instead of solving it. The predictions are about as accurate as the classical approximations but around 30 million times faster. Müller compares the work with Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold: AlphaFold shows the first and last frames of a film, the folded structure of a protein, while his model shows the whole film, the “dance” of molecules as they move and bind. Large molecules are split into fragments that the model learns to put back together. A calculation that would once have taken about as long as the age of the universe now takes a few weeks. The result is a universal, quantum-accurate molecular dynamics model, which Müller compares to a large language model for chemistry, with possible uses in materials science and drug development.
Watch the full video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DT_ZSNXc_Q
About the series: Google Germany launched AI Backstage Stories in September 2025 to show the people behind its AI products and research. Philipp Justus and Christine Antlanger-Winter, Country Director of Google Switzerland, hosted the early episodes, which were filmed in Berlin and Zurich.