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Google DeepMind dismantles AlphaFold team
- hamburgererror 3mo agohttps://archive.is/YcrLG https://archive.is/YcrLG
- plt3120 3mo agoSo many words for "we don't know what to do and want ROI now". Truly SoTA spinning.
- adverbly 3mo agoPainful to see teams doing great work getting pulled away on the premise that there is "even greater work" to be done in other areas. There was something magical about the old days of Bell labs where there was just a naturally occurring and self-organizing list of all-star scientists who were in control over their area of research. Too much money and power pushing and directing these individuals. The clock is on and the magic is gone.
- ainch 3mo agoJohn Jumper moving to work on LLM coding capabilities does seem quite shortsighted - and little surprise perhaps that he then quit to work on AI for science again at Anthropic.
- jackb4040 3mo agoThe "greater work" is scanning then burning millions of books btw
- philipkglass 3mo agoGoogle was scanning millions of books before the LLM craze, and they didn't burn them. They partnered with libraries and built their own non-destructive scanning hardware. I'm guessing this comment is really about Anthropic, but they are distinct companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Scanning_of_books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Scanning_of_books EDIT: I commented before reading the FT article. The comment by jackb4040 makes more sense to me now: some AlphaFold team members are moving to Anthropic, the company that has been in the news for shredding scanned books.
- jackb4040 3mo agoI actually didn't mean it literally, more just the general sense that any job you're doing that isn't sufficiently evil will eventually be rolled up. But that's interesting that there is now a literal connection between these two stories!
- satvikpendem 3mo agoDon't confuse Google and Anthropic. Google already has a huge corpus of books via Google Books, none of which they burned after since they were borrowed books. The recent Anthropic settlement does not require them to burn books at all, they just can't keep them indefinitely whether physically or virtually. Nothing stops them from donating the books again.
- sirwhinesalot 3mo agoAnthropic destroyed the books, they can't donate them again.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoYes, the law does not require them to destroy the books is my point.
- impossiblefork 3mo agoYes, but surely the problem isn't that the law requires anything in particular, but rather that a bunch of books are getting bought by an organization that is likely to systematically destroy them and that there among those books are a niche books or unusual books that would end up disappearing, and thus that cultural artifacts and knowledge might be disappearing due to this.
- Legend2440 3mo agoI really don't care. Books aren't sacred, and the information in them will be far more accessible once digitized and trained than it would sitting on a shelf where no one will read it.
- m4rtink 3mo agoI would argue that books are sacred & anyone destroying books is a bad person. History seems to agree - bad people did usually destroy a lot of books.
- gord288 3mo agoFalse dichotomy. The books could have been digitized WITHOUT being destroyed. There’s no reason to assume that digital ebooks/documents will be accessible or readable to anyone in say 75 years. A physical book will be just as accessible today, as it will be practically forever. Okay there’s the acid paper thing but still… there’s no reason for Anthropic to destroy the books.
- hmokiguess 3mo agoWeird times, next up they'll all end up named "Member of the Technical Staff" and working on "Classified"
- t1234s 3mo agoFuture Headline: Google dismantles Waymo team
- crispycas12 3mo agoSeems to be Adler and Jumper moving to Anthropic is some of the impetus to disband, no?
- ainch 3mo agoThe chronology in the article seems to suggest that they moved (or were moved) off of AlphaFold earlier this year, prior to quitting.