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Jesus. Tell me more. You didn’t happen to be involved in deepmind are you? I kind of _loathe_ google these days but find it absolutely mind blowing that there w

by heyoni 3y ago

Jesus. Tell me more. You didn’t happen to be involved in deepmind are you? I kind of _loathe_ google these days but find it absolutely mind blowing that there was a time when they were just casually unblocking the scientific community for funsies…to the point where parents could just leverage google’s freebies to maybe shed some light on their kids’ rare disease. It pains me to think this won’t be happening anymore because really, you can’t sic your brightness engineers on detecting ad blockers _and_ casually make scientific breakthroughs. Something happened to google and the we’ll be writing about for decades to come but if there’s one thing I’m certain it’s that they are done trying to make the world a better place.

mike_hearn 3y ago
Has that changed? AlphaFold is recent and was practically given away to the biotech community. Google is doing a startup based around it as well. So they're still unblocking scientists for funsies, maybe moreso than in the past.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Google/Deepmind research still has a fairly large subgroup working on health problems, but most of that work is not given away (or even easily licensable) or published in a way that competitors could reproduce. What Isomorphic, the spinoff, learned pretty quickly is that protein structure prediction is not, has never been, and is unlikely to be, the most critical blocking step in developing new drugs. That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them. Right now pharma is terrified because their pipelines are drying up, their blockbusters are going generic, and the recent rates of new discoveries leading to new candidates (target diseases/bio pathways) are dropping, even as they invest more and more into automation and machine learning. (By the way Mike- I always did wish you had been able to run your "math problems" on exacycle, as a way of monetizing idle cores)
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Ahhh, I wondered about the importance of structure prediction for a long time, ever since reading those blog posts by a PSP researcher in academia who was complaining that big pharma didn't invest in the field. He was asking "why was it Google who solved this problem and not a Pfizer or Bayer?" His posited explanation was a sort of cultural/institutional disinterest in advanced R&D, but that didn't sound very plausible compared to the other possibility that they just didn't care much about the problem to begin with. > That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them. I didn't quite follow this, could you maybe elaborate? What is a virtual dollar in this context? Do you mean they make promises of future payments if certain goals are achieved, but the dollars never become real because the goals aren't achievable? Re: math problems. I remember looking at Exacycle and wondering about that :) but concluded it would have been self defeating, as it'd just have resulted in Google dominating the network and that'd have been seen as an attack.
- heyoni 3y ago
  No. Alphafold is absolutely amazing and one of those shining beacons of what humanity can accomplish when we optimize for the greater good — or the other bottom line. What I’m saying is, I don’t think there’s another one project like it in the pipeline…not from the company that’s focusing its resources and talents on throttling browsers with adblockers. I realize that this is an oversimplification and these changes take decades to become fully realized but you have to admit, it’s a bizarre thing to focus on from the company that literally solved protein folding. These geniuses were advancing humankind and at some point and now they’re doing “this”.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    DeepMind is only possible because of ad money, though. The people who ensure Google has the funds to invest in such projects are a critical part of the team. As for more projects in the pipeline, well, see the sibling post by dekhn. It's hard to know what's important to work on if you aren't actually on the front lines. DeepMind did AlphaFold because it saw a way to apply its general AI research to biotech, not because it's a biotech firm.
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by heyoni 3y ago

mike_hearn 3y ago

Has that changed? AlphaFold is recent and was practically given away to the biotech community. Google is doing a startup based around it as well. So they're still unblocking scientists for funsies, maybe moreso than in the past.

dekhn 3y ago
Google/Deepmind research still has a fairly large subgroup working on health problems, but most of that work is not given away (or even easily licensable) or published in a way that competitors could reproduce. What Isomorphic, the spinoff, learned pretty quickly is that protein structure prediction is not, has never been, and is unlikely to be, the most critical blocking step in developing new drugs. That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them. Right now pharma is terrified because their pipelines are drying up, their blockbusters are going generic, and the recent rates of new discoveries leading to new candidates (target diseases/bio pathways) are dropping, even as they invest more and more into automation and machine learning. (By the way Mike- I always did wish you had been able to run your "math problems" on exacycle, as a way of monetizing idle cores)
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Ahhh, I wondered about the importance of structure prediction for a long time, ever since reading those blog posts by a PSP researcher in academia who was complaining that big pharma didn't invest in the field. He was asking "why was it Google who solved this problem and not a Pfizer or Bayer?" His posited explanation was a sort of cultural/institutional disinterest in advanced R&D, but that didn't sound very plausible compared to the other possibility that they just didn't care much about the problem to begin with. > That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them. I didn't quite follow this, could you maybe elaborate? What is a virtual dollar in this context? Do you mean they make promises of future payments if certain goals are achieved, but the dollars never become real because the goals aren't achievable? Re: math problems. I remember looking at Exacycle and wondering about that :) but concluded it would have been self defeating, as it'd just have resulted in Google dominating the network and that'd have been seen as an attack.
heyoni 3y ago
No. Alphafold is absolutely amazing and one of those shining beacons of what humanity can accomplish when we optimize for the greater good — or the other bottom line. What I’m saying is, I don’t think there’s another one project like it in the pipeline…not from the company that’s focusing its resources and talents on throttling browsers with adblockers. I realize that this is an oversimplification and these changes take decades to become fully realized but you have to admit, it’s a bizarre thing to focus on from the company that literally solved protein folding. These geniuses were advancing humankind and at some point and now they’re doing “this”.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  DeepMind is only possible because of ad money, though. The people who ensure Google has the funds to invest in such projects are a critical part of the team. As for more projects in the pipeline, well, see the sibling post by dekhn. It's hard to know what's important to work on if you aren't actually on the front lines. DeepMind did AlphaFold because it saw a way to apply its general AI research to biotech, not because it's a biotech firm.

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