4 ms·

The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepren

by aborsy 2y ago

The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized. I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development. These AI demonstrations require so many GPUs, specialized hardware and data that nobody has but the biggest players. Moreover, they are engineering work, not really scientistic (putting together a lot of hacks and tweaks). Meanwhile, the person who led the transformer paper (a key ingredient in LLMs) hasn’t been recognized. This will incentivize scientists to focus on management of other researchers who will manage other researchers who will produce the technical inventions. The same issue arises with citations and indices, and the general reward structure in academia. The signal these AI events convey to me: You better focus on practical stuff, and you better move on in the management ladder.

world2vec 2y ago
Hasn't it always been like that? The lab director gets to receive the prize, not the whole team (which could have hundreds or thousands of people).
bonoboTP 2y ago
The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public. It has a kind of late 19th century progressive humanistic ethos. It's science outreach. This way, at least once a year, the everyday layperson hears about scientific discoveries. The Nobel isn't a vehicle to recognize hundreds of thousands of deeply technical scientific researchers. How could it be? They have to pick a symbolic figurehead to represent a breakthrough. They could also simply give it to "DeepMind" similar to how they give the peace prize to orgs sometimes, or how the Time Person of the Year is sometimes something abstract as well (like the cutesy "You" of 2006). But it would be silly. Just deal with it, we can't "recognize" hundreds of thousands, and we want to see a personal face, not a logo of a company getting the award. That's how we are, better learn to deal with it.
- dsign 2y ago
  > The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public... Which is okay. The Nobel prize is okay. > This way, at least once a year, the everyday layperson hears about scientific discoveries. Spot on. The problem we have is that the everyday layperson hears very little about scientific discoveries. The scientists themselves, one in a million of them, can get a Nobel prize. The rest, if they are lucky, get a somewhat okay salary. Sometimes better than that of a software engineer. Almost always worse working hours. But I suppose it's all for the best. Imagine a world where a good scientist, one that knows everything about biology and protein folding, gets to avoid cancer and even aging, while the everyday layperson can only go to the doctor...
  - madmask 2y ago
    That would be a good incentive to become a good scientist
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    At least one American Nobel laureate has had to sell his nobel prize medal to pay for medical costs in their old age. Just insane.
  - adw 2y ago
    > Sometimes better than that of a software engineer There is a reason so many of us work as software engineers now; I earn about 5x more than I would as a university lecturer/assistant professor.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
pyb 2y ago
The paper has a mention : "These authors contributed equally: ..." However, it appears that some the authors were more equal than others.
- falcor84 2y ago
  The Nobel prize isn't awarded for a paper. Even if (and that's a large if) all of these contributed equally to the results in the paper, some obviously did more than others to prepare the ground for that study.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
mhandley 2y ago
The Nobel prize cannot go to a team so they have to pick individuals. This is true for many (most?) nobel prize awards. Consider for example the discovery of gravity waves - the team that built and operated LIGO was huge, but they have to pick. This has commonly been the case since the inception of the prizes - the professor gets the prize, the PhD students and postdocs don't usually. Not saying this is right, but it's the way it is.
- elashri 2y ago
  For gravitational waves discovery, Nobel prize went to the designers of the LIGO which was done long before we actually built it. The example that will fit more your idea would be Carlo Rubbia who got the award in 1984 for leading the CERN team who discovered the W and Z bosons. He did not have any contributions than leading the experiment that did it [1]. It is not like he designed or proposed the way we used to detect them. And the Nobel prize for higgs discovery went to theorists who proposed and predict it not the experimental physicists (thousands) who discovered it in 2012. [1] https://home.cern/science/experiments/ua1 https://home.cern/science/experiments/ua1
- erk__ 2y ago
  It is only the Peace Prize that may be given to more than 3 people, which have been done 30 times: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-prize-awarded-organizations/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-prize-awarded-...
abm53 2y ago
I did raise an eyebrow at it too, but I doubt his contribution was entirely “management of resources”. I think one must also give him the credit for the vision, risk taking and drive to apply the resources at his disposal, and RL, to these particular problems. Without that push this research would never have been done, but there may have been many fungible people willing to iron out the details (and, to be fair, contribute some important ideas along the way). I’m not a proponent of the “great man” theory of history, but based on the above I can see that this could be fair (although I have no way of telling if internally this is actually how it played out).
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Agree. Hassabis is more than a manager. He did start DeepMind with just a few people and was a big part of the brains behind it. Now that it has grown he might be doing more management. But the groundwork that went into AlphaFold was built on all the earlier Alphaxxx things they have built, and he contributed. It isn't like other big tech managers that just got some new thing dumped in their lap. He did start off building this.
nsoonhui 2y ago
So can we expect that Sam Altman will be honored with Nobel prize 2025? After all physics prize went to AI researchers this year, and chemistry prize went to an organizational head.
- patall 2y ago
  He may still win literature this year.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    I can only predict a more prestigious prize on the horizon in the future. Isn't sama on track to end up with more financial resources than Nobel had at his disposal? Plus I think he's got enough of a philanthropic streak which can prove to be not so shabby. There could very well be a foundation someday awarding the Altman Prize well into the 22nd century. Whether or not his most dynamic legacy would be something as simultaneously useful/dangerous as dynamite.
    - patall 2y ago
      Hassabis should also be a billionaire by now.
    - jsnell 2y ago
      The Nobel prize's prestige comes from its history, not from the size of the monetary award. For an example, the Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every two years and the prize money is slightly higher than the Nobel prize (1M EUR vs 0.94M EUR). The achievements it's been awarded for tend to be much more practical, immediate and understandable than the Nobel prize achievements. The next one should be awarded in a couple of weeks. And when that happens, it'll get 1/10th the publicity a Nobel prize gets, because the Nobel prize is older than any living human and has been accumulating prestige all that time, while the Millennium prize is only 20 years old.
  - pyb 2y ago
    He's up for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. https://x.com/S_OhEigeartaigh/status/1843979139948355893 https://x.com/S_OhEigeartaigh/status/1843979139948355893
dist-epoch 2y ago
> These AI demonstrations require so many GPUs, specialized hardware and data that nobody has but the biggest players. Moreover, they are engineering work, not really scientistic So is the Large Hadron Collider.
alkonaut 2y ago
> The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. That's usually how you get a Nobel prize in science. You become an accomplished scientist, and eventually you lead a big lab/department/project and with a massive massiv you work on projects where there are big discoveries. These discoveries aren't possible to attribute to individuals. If you look back through history and try to find how many "Boss professor leading massive team/project" vs. how many "Einstein type making big discovery in their own head" I think you'll find that the former is a lot more common. > This will incentivize scientists to focus on management of other researchers who will manage other researchers who will produce the technical inventions. I don't think the Nobel prize is a large driver of science. It's a celebration and a way to put a spotlight on something and someone. But I doubt many people choose careers or projects based on "this might get us the prize..."
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > You become an accomplished scientist, and eventually you lead a big lab/department/project and with a massive massiv you work on projects where there are big discoveries. That's a very recent thing. Up to the 90s, the Nobel committee refused to even recognize it. They just started to award those prizes at the 21 century, and on most fields they never became the majority.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by aborsy 2y ago

world2vec 2y ago

Hasn't it always been like that? The lab director gets to receive the prize, not the whole team (which could have hundreds or thousands of people).

bonoboTP 2y ago

The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public. It has a kind of late 19th century progressive humanistic ethos. It's science outreach. This way, at least once a year, the everyday layperson hears about scientific discoveries. The Nobel isn't a vehicle to recognize hundreds of thousands of deeply technical scientific researchers. How could it be? They have to pick a symbolic figurehead to represent a breakthrough. They could also simply give it to "DeepMind" similar to how they give the peace prize to orgs sometimes, or how the Time Person of the Year is sometimes something abstract as well (like the cutesy "You" of 2006). But it would be silly. Just deal with it, we can't "recognize" hundreds of thousands, and we want to see a personal face, not a logo of a company getting the award. That's how we are, better learn to deal with it.

dsign 2y ago
> The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public... Which is okay. The Nobel prize is okay. > This way, at least once a year, the everyday layperson hears about scientific discoveries. Spot on. The problem we have is that the everyday layperson hears very little about scientific discoveries. The scientists themselves, one in a million of them, can get a Nobel prize. The rest, if they are lucky, get a somewhat okay salary. Sometimes better than that of a software engineer. Almost always worse working hours. But I suppose it's all for the best. Imagine a world where a good scientist, one that knows everything about biology and protein folding, gets to avoid cancer and even aging, while the everyday layperson can only go to the doctor...
- madmask 2y ago
  That would be a good incentive to become a good scientist
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  At least one American Nobel laureate has had to sell his nobel prize medal to pay for medical costs in their old age. Just insane.
- adw 2y ago
  > Sometimes better than that of a software engineer There is a reason so many of us work as software engineers now; I earn about 5x more than I would as a university lecturer/assistant professor.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

pyb 2y ago

The paper has a mention : "These authors contributed equally: ..." However, it appears that some the authors were more equal than others.

falcor84 2y ago
The Nobel prize isn't awarded for a paper. Even if (and that's a large if) all of these contributed equally to the results in the paper, some obviously did more than others to prepare the ground for that study.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

mhandley 2y ago

The Nobel prize cannot go to a team so they have to pick individuals. This is true for many (most?) nobel prize awards. Consider for example the discovery of gravity waves - the team that built and operated LIGO was huge, but they have to pick. This has commonly been the case since the inception of the prizes - the professor gets the prize, the PhD students and postdocs don't usually. Not saying this is right, but it's the way it is.

elashri 2y ago
For gravitational waves discovery, Nobel prize went to the designers of the LIGO which was done long before we actually built it. The example that will fit more your idea would be Carlo Rubbia who got the award in 1984 for leading the CERN team who discovered the W and Z bosons. He did not have any contributions than leading the experiment that did it [1]. It is not like he designed or proposed the way we used to detect them. And the Nobel prize for higgs discovery went to theorists who proposed and predict it not the experimental physicists (thousands) who discovered it in 2012. [1] https://home.cern/science/experiments/ua1 https://home.cern/science/experiments/ua1
erk__ 2y ago
It is only the Peace Prize that may be given to more than 3 people, which have been done 30 times: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-prize-awarded-organizations/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-prize-awarded-...

abm53 2y ago

I did raise an eyebrow at it too, but I doubt his contribution was entirely “management of resources”. I think one must also give him the credit for the vision, risk taking and drive to apply the resources at his disposal, and RL, to these particular problems. Without that push this research would never have been done, but there may have been many fungible people willing to iron out the details (and, to be fair, contribute some important ideas along the way). I’m not a proponent of the “great man” theory of history, but based on the above I can see that this could be fair (although I have no way of telling if internally this is actually how it played out).

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Agree. Hassabis is more than a manager. He did start DeepMind with just a few people and was a big part of the brains behind it. Now that it has grown he might be doing more management. But the groundwork that went into AlphaFold was built on all the earlier Alphaxxx things they have built, and he contributed. It isn't like other big tech managers that just got some new thing dumped in their lap. He did start off building this.

nsoonhui 2y ago

So can we expect that Sam Altman will be honored with Nobel prize 2025? After all physics prize went to AI researchers this year, and chemistry prize went to an organizational head.

patall 2y ago
He may still win literature this year.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  I can only predict a more prestigious prize on the horizon in the future. Isn't sama on track to end up with more financial resources than Nobel had at his disposal? Plus I think he's got enough of a philanthropic streak which can prove to be not so shabby. There could very well be a foundation someday awarding the Altman Prize well into the 22nd century. Whether or not his most dynamic legacy would be something as simultaneously useful/dangerous as dynamite.
  - patall 2y ago
    Hassabis should also be a billionaire by now.
  - jsnell 2y ago
    The Nobel prize's prestige comes from its history, not from the size of the monetary award. For an example, the Millennium Technology Prize is awarded every two years and the prize money is slightly higher than the Nobel prize (1M EUR vs 0.94M EUR). The achievements it's been awarded for tend to be much more practical, immediate and understandable than the Nobel prize achievements. The next one should be awarded in a couple of weeks. And when that happens, it'll get 1/10th the publicity a Nobel prize gets, because the Nobel prize is older than any living human and has been accumulating prestige all that time, while the Millennium prize is only 20 years old.
- pyb 2y ago
  He's up for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. https://x.com/S_OhEigeartaigh/status/1843979139948355893 https://x.com/S_OhEigeartaigh/status/1843979139948355893

dist-epoch 2y ago

> These AI demonstrations require so many GPUs, specialized hardware and data that nobody has but the biggest players. Moreover, they are engineering work, not really scientistic So is the Large Hadron Collider.

alkonaut 2y ago

> The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. That's usually how you get a Nobel prize in science. You become an accomplished scientist, and eventually you lead a big lab/department/project and with a massive massiv you work on projects where there are big discoveries. These discoveries aren't possible to attribute to individuals. If you look back through history and try to find how many "Boss professor leading massive team/project" vs. how many "Einstein type making big discovery in their own head" I think you'll find that the former is a lot more common. > This will incentivize scientists to focus on management of other researchers who will manage other researchers who will produce the technical inventions. I don't think the Nobel prize is a large driver of science. It's a celebration and a way to put a spotlight on something and someone. But I doubt many people choose careers or projects based on "this might get us the prize..."

marcosdumay 2y ago
> You become an accomplished scientist, and eventually you lead a big lab/department/project and with a massive massiv you work on projects where there are big discoveries. That's a very recent thing. Up to the 90s, the Nobel committee refused to even recognize it. They just started to award those prizes at the 21 century, and on most fields they never became the majority.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]