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That's the case with basically everything DeepMind does. They have a very good PR department which hypes up everything they do while conveniently ignoring that

That's the case with basically everything DeepMind does. They have a very good PR department which hypes up everything they do while conveniently ignoring that basically nothing of any practical consequence has come of their endeavors. But I do think it's important that these companies exist now so we can see what not to try going forward.

timr 5y ago
Well, the CASP14 results do speak for themselves. Protein structure prediction is not necessarily of great meaning to drug discovery or biology, but they pretty much blew everyone else out of the water in a fair contest. For that reason, they deserve praise. It's a little like making a robot that is very, very good at something pointless (say, using a yo-yo). Who knows where it might lead, but if they make the best damned yo-yo bot in the world, they deserve whatever praise they get from the yo-yo community.
sdenton4 5y ago
Well here's one example: Deepmind made Wavenet, which turned text-to-speech on it's head. Variants of Wavenet underlie most or all of the talking machines (Google assistant, Alexa, etc.).
- TaupeRanger 5y ago
  That's pretty much it. A maybe-slightly-better computer voice.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    Well, also Alpha-Fold, and let's not forget beating the world champions at Go, which was a really major unsolved problem. I'll also contend that WaveNet was not 'maybe-slightly-better,' but actually a massive leap forward. The phrase 'who pissed in your cheerios' comes to mind... Here's hoping that if you ever build something worthwhile it is received with a bit more compassion.
Jyaif 5y ago
Their PR strategy is to take problems people thought were impossible to solve in the next 10 years, and solve them (Go) or nearly solve them (StarCraft 2, protein solving)
- dekhn 5y ago
  DM didn't "solve" anything around proteins. They just made an improvement to existing homology modelling methods. If you look, the system is incredibly dependent on having large numbers of high quality sequence alignments to proteins with known structure and lots and lots of evolutionary data. This was actually fairly obvious 20 years ago and it's been disappointing to me to see how long it took somebody to make this improvement, but really, it couldn't have been done without recent algorithmic improvements and huge amounts of CPU time.
- TaupeRanger 5y ago
  No one thought that Go was impossible except people who weren't involved in engineering/software and shouldn't have been taken seriously in the first place. Superhuman game AI has existed for decades. It's entirely unsurprising that one can play a strategy game, and no one thought it wasn't possible. I'll send you $500 USD if AlphaFold derivatives lead to a single new therapy or drug that helps real patients in the next 5 years.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    'In the next 10 years' is the key phrase here. Everyone watching Go (I looked at the problem 15-ish years ago) thought it required a massive advance to beat the best humans. DeepMind made that advance. 'bah, whatever, both Newton and Leibniz were hacks. Everyone knew calculus would have been invented anyway. It's basically a consequence of some stuff Archimedes did.'

timr 5y ago

Well, the CASP14 results do speak for themselves. Protein structure prediction is not necessarily of great meaning to drug discovery or biology, but they pretty much blew everyone else out of the water in a fair contest. For that reason, they deserve praise. It's a little like making a robot that is very, very good at something pointless (say, using a yo-yo). Who knows where it might lead, but if they make the best damned yo-yo bot in the world, they deserve whatever praise they get from the yo-yo community.

sdenton4 5y ago

Well here's one example: Deepmind made Wavenet, which turned text-to-speech on it's head. Variants of Wavenet underlie most or all of the talking machines (Google assistant, Alexa, etc.).

TaupeRanger 5y ago
That's pretty much it. A maybe-slightly-better computer voice.
- sdenton4 5y ago
  Well, also Alpha-Fold, and let's not forget beating the world champions at Go, which was a really major unsolved problem. I'll also contend that WaveNet was not 'maybe-slightly-better,' but actually a massive leap forward. The phrase 'who pissed in your cheerios' comes to mind... Here's hoping that if you ever build something worthwhile it is received with a bit more compassion.

Jyaif 5y ago

Their PR strategy is to take problems people thought were impossible to solve in the next 10 years, and solve them (Go) or nearly solve them (StarCraft 2, protein solving)

dekhn 5y ago
DM didn't "solve" anything around proteins. They just made an improvement to existing homology modelling methods. If you look, the system is incredibly dependent on having large numbers of high quality sequence alignments to proteins with known structure and lots and lots of evolutionary data. This was actually fairly obvious 20 years ago and it's been disappointing to me to see how long it took somebody to make this improvement, but really, it couldn't have been done without recent algorithmic improvements and huge amounts of CPU time.
TaupeRanger 5y ago
No one thought that Go was impossible except people who weren't involved in engineering/software and shouldn't have been taken seriously in the first place. Superhuman game AI has existed for decades. It's entirely unsurprising that one can play a strategy game, and no one thought it wasn't possible. I'll send you $500 USD if AlphaFold derivatives lead to a single new therapy or drug that helps real patients in the next 5 years.
- sdenton4 5y ago
  'In the next 10 years' is the key phrase here. Everyone watching Go (I looked at the problem 15-ish years ago) thought it required a massive advance to beat the best humans. DeepMind made that advance. 'bah, whatever, both Newton and Leibniz were hacks. Everyone knew calculus would have been invented anyway. It's basically a consequence of some stuff Archimedes did.'