4 ms·
> "they are not exactly having a massive impact, even as they do a lot of cool stuff" AlphaFold has changed the course of structural biology research and some
by bglazer 5y ago
> "they are not exactly having a massive impact, even as they do a lot of cool stuff"
AlphaFold has changed the course of structural biology research and some descendant of that technology will absolutely be used to design drugs that many people take.
The academic research community would eventually have built models with the same performance as AlphaFold2, probably within the decade. Nonetheless, DeepMind was first, and way ahead of everyone else.
I don't understand how the goalposts have moved so far that solving protein folding only counts as a cool trick or novelty.
- klipt 5y ago> I don't understand how the goalposts have moved so far that solving protein folding only counts as a cool trick or novelty. It's the AI paradox. Before you solve a problem, like playing superhuman chess, people say "that's hard, you'd need real Artificial Intelligence to do that!" After you solve the problem, they see the solution and say "wait, that's just engineering, not real AI". Happens every time.
- linspace 5y agoThere are two interpretations: in one you put a metric and when you find people is cheating you move the metric. In the other interpretation you really don't have any idea what you want and when people give you concrete results you change your mind (this rings so close to any job...)
- MayeulC 5y agoThat's true of every np-complete (or similar class) problem: it's easy to verify that a solution work, but hard to find it in the space of possible solutions. Reportedly, quantum computers can help us with some problems of that kind.