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- "Imagine the goodwill for humanity for releasing these pure research systems for free." The entire point[0] is that they want to sell an API to drug-develope

- "Imagine the goodwill for humanity for releasing these pure research systems for free." The entire point[0] is that they want to sell an API to drug-developer labs, at exclusive-monopoly pricing. Those labs in turn discover life-saving drugs, and recoup their costs from e.g. parents of otherwise-terminally-ill children—again, priced as an exclusive monopoly. [0] As signaled by "it is not possible to obtain structures of proteins bound to possible drugs" It's a massive windfall for Alphabet, and it'd be a profound breach of their fiduciary duties as a public company to do anything other than lock-down and hoard this API, and squeeze it for every last billion. This is a deeply, deeply, deeply broken situation.

karencarits 3y ago
What is the current status of drugs where the major contribution is from AI? Are they protectable like other drugs? Or are they more copyless like AI art and so on?
iknowstuff 3y ago
Is it broken if it yields new drugs? Is there a system that yields more? The whole point of capitalism is that it incentivizes this in a way that no other system does.
- l33tman 3y ago
  My point one level up in the comments here, was not really that the system is broken, but more like asking how you can run these companies (google and that other part run by the deepmind founder, who I bet already has more money than he can ever spend) and still sleep well knowing you're the rich capitalist a-hole commercializing life-science work that your parent company has allocated maybe one part in a million of their R&D budget into creating. It's not like Google is ever going to make billions on this anyway, the alphafold algorithms are not super advanced and you don't require the datasets of gpt4 to train them so others will hopefully catch up.. though I'm also pretty sure it requires GPU-hours beyond what a typical non-profit academia outfit has available unfortunately.. :/
lupire 3y ago
The parents of those otherwise terminally ill children disagree with you in the strongest possible terms.
goggy_googy 3y ago
What makes this such a "deeply broken situation"? I agree that late-stage capitalism can create really tough situations for poor families trying to afford drugs. At the same time, I don't know any other incentive structure that would have brought us a breakthrough like AlphaFold this soon. For the first time in history, we have ML models that are beating out the scientific models by huge margins. The very fact that this comes out of the richest, most competitive country in the history of the world is not a coincidence. The proximate cause of the suffering for terminally-ill children is really the drug company's pricing. If you want to regulate this, though, you'll almost certainly have fewer breakthroughs like AlphaFold. From a utilitarian perspective, by preserving the existing incentive structure (the "deeply broken situation" as you call it), you will be extending the lifespans of more people in the future (as opposed to extending lifespans of more people now by lowering drug prices).
- firefoxbrower 3y ago
  Late-stage capitalism didn't bring us AlphaFold, scientists did, late-stage capitalism just brought us Alphabet swooping in at literally the last minute. Socialize the innovation because that requires potential losses, privatize the profits, basically. It's reminiscent of "Heroes of CRISPR," where Doudna and Charpentier are supposedly just some middle-men, because stepping in at the last minute with more funding is really what fuels innovation. AlphaFold wasn't some lone genius breakthrough that came out of nowhere, everything but the final steps were basically created in academia through public funding. The key insights, some combination of realizing that the importance of sequence to structure to function put analyzable constraints on sequence conservation and which ML models could be applied to this, were made in academia a long time ago. AlphaFold's training set, the PDB, is also a result of decades of publicly funded work. After that, the problem was just getting enough funding amidst funding cuts and inflation to optimize. David Baker at IPD did so relatively successfully, Jinbo Xu is less of a fundraiser but was able to keep up basically alone with one or two grad students at a time, etc. AlphaFold1 threw way more people and money to basically copy what Jinbo Xu had already done and barely beat him at that year's CASP. Academics were leading the way until very, very recently, it's not like the problem was stalled for decades. Thankfully, the funding cuts will continue until research improves, and after decades of inflation cutting into grants, we are being rewarded by funding cuts to almost every major funding body this year. I pledge allegiance to the flag! EDIT: Basically, if you know any scientists, you know the vast majority of us work for years with little consideration for profit because we care about the science and its social impact. It's grating for the community, after being treated worse every year, to then see all the final credit go to people or companies like Eric Lander and Google. Then everyone has to start over, pick some new niche that everyone thinks is impossible, only to worry about losing it when someone begins to get it to work.

karencarits 3y ago

What is the current status of drugs where the major contribution is from AI? Are they protectable like other drugs? Or are they more copyless like AI art and so on?

iknowstuff 3y ago

Is it broken if it yields new drugs? Is there a system that yields more? The whole point of capitalism is that it incentivizes this in a way that no other system does.

l33tman 3y ago
My point one level up in the comments here, was not really that the system is broken, but more like asking how you can run these companies (google and that other part run by the deepmind founder, who I bet already has more money than he can ever spend) and still sleep well knowing you're the rich capitalist a-hole commercializing life-science work that your parent company has allocated maybe one part in a million of their R&D budget into creating. It's not like Google is ever going to make billions on this anyway, the alphafold algorithms are not super advanced and you don't require the datasets of gpt4 to train them so others will hopefully catch up.. though I'm also pretty sure it requires GPU-hours beyond what a typical non-profit academia outfit has available unfortunately.. :/

lupire 3y ago

The parents of those otherwise terminally ill children disagree with you in the strongest possible terms.

goggy_googy 3y ago

What makes this such a "deeply broken situation"? I agree that late-stage capitalism can create really tough situations for poor families trying to afford drugs. At the same time, I don't know any other incentive structure that would have brought us a breakthrough like AlphaFold this soon. For the first time in history, we have ML models that are beating out the scientific models by huge margins. The very fact that this comes out of the richest, most competitive country in the history of the world is not a coincidence. The proximate cause of the suffering for terminally-ill children is really the drug company's pricing. If you want to regulate this, though, you'll almost certainly have fewer breakthroughs like AlphaFold. From a utilitarian perspective, by preserving the existing incentive structure (the "deeply broken situation" as you call it), you will be extending the lifespans of more people in the future (as opposed to extending lifespans of more people now by lowering drug prices).

firefoxbrower 3y ago
Late-stage capitalism didn't bring us AlphaFold, scientists did, late-stage capitalism just brought us Alphabet swooping in at literally the last minute. Socialize the innovation because that requires potential losses, privatize the profits, basically. It's reminiscent of "Heroes of CRISPR," where Doudna and Charpentier are supposedly just some middle-men, because stepping in at the last minute with more funding is really what fuels innovation. AlphaFold wasn't some lone genius breakthrough that came out of nowhere, everything but the final steps were basically created in academia through public funding. The key insights, some combination of realizing that the importance of sequence to structure to function put analyzable constraints on sequence conservation and which ML models could be applied to this, were made in academia a long time ago. AlphaFold's training set, the PDB, is also a result of decades of publicly funded work. After that, the problem was just getting enough funding amidst funding cuts and inflation to optimize. David Baker at IPD did so relatively successfully, Jinbo Xu is less of a fundraiser but was able to keep up basically alone with one or two grad students at a time, etc. AlphaFold1 threw way more people and money to basically copy what Jinbo Xu had already done and barely beat him at that year's CASP. Academics were leading the way until very, very recently, it's not like the problem was stalled for decades. Thankfully, the funding cuts will continue until research improves, and after decades of inflation cutting into grants, we are being rewarded by funding cuts to almost every major funding body this year. I pledge allegiance to the flag! EDIT: Basically, if you know any scientists, you know the vast majority of us work for years with little consideration for profit because we care about the science and its social impact. It's grating for the community, after being treated worse every year, to then see all the final credit go to people or companies like Eric Lander and Google. Then everyone has to start over, pick some new niche that everyone thinks is impossible, only to worry about losing it when someone begins to get it to work.