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Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096841
- vicapow 2mo agoIs there a lot more work to be done?
- the_real_cher 2mo agoThere's a fair amount
- thaumasiotes 2mo ago> DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold. > In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. Why is there no information on corroborations of the predictions? Anyone can make predictions. Surely there must have been teams picking predicted structures out of the database and comparing them to actual molecules?
- colingauvin 2mo agoThere's plenty of information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASP
- jrflo 2mo ago> DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. Is this existing database enough for researchers?
- spwa4 2mo agoAlphaFold 1 and 2 are open, and freely licensed, weights, and they're still online and downloadable. Alphafold 3 is open weight. I'm guessing Google can't make money on them. You can do more with the weights than just the protein structures. You can design new proteins. So no, the database is not enough. But the weights and a university cluster are enough.
- flopsamjetsam 2mo ago> I'm guessing Google can't make money on them. The weights are free for non-commercial use. And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies. Edit: after reading the article, I realise it's about the disbanding of the team, so probably your original comment is correct.
- spwa4 2mo ago> The weights are free for non-commercial use. Nope. Alphafold 1 & 2 can be used for whatever you want. Also this has resulted in them being used to train better models than Alphafold 3. > And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies. Yep. And given how Pharma works, being the "descendants" of Nobel-prize winning research I'm sad to say this will probably work and pay pretty well (not by Google standards, but by anyone else's standard, pretty well), despite the fact that there are better models.
- BariumBlue 2mo agoAs per the article they're slowly shuttering the project, but I assume AlphaFold itself is still available and usable? I assume that AlphaFold isn't perfect, but surely after so many years on it most of the useful juice had been squeezed in terms of making it a useful tool?
- westurner 2mo agogoogle-deepmind/alphafold3: AlphaFold 3 inference pipeline https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold3 https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold3 And then host then database. AlphaFold did not yet solve the Folding@home protein folding problem. Folding@home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
- dude250711 2mo agoThey realised it's time... Gemini to follow?
- Insanity 2mo agoI know you're saying this tongue in cheek. But the reason they're shuttering Alphafold is (likely) to assign those engineers and their expertise to Generative AI initiatives like Gemini.
- balozi 2mo agoThe obvious question to any business leader is "why?" Why deploy resources to a project? Is this project central to our current or future revenue streams? If not, toss it out.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoIt has justifiably generated a lot of good will for Google. Applying AI to help science rather than to replace people's jobs. I think this is why you are now seeing OpenAI and Anthropic try to do more science work, but in their case, coming so late, it seems a cynical PR move as opposed to heartfelt from Hassabis. It seems that Isomorphic Labs is somewhat a continuation of the AlphaFold work, and the first attempt to commercialize it, so maybe they will get more than just good will out of it.
- colingauvin 2mo ago>DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. This is not even close to reality. AlphaFold is not a solution to the protein folding problem, it's (useful) pattern matching to the end state of solved folded protein (in situations that can be pattern matched). If this is considered "solving the protein folding problem" then X-ray crystallography solved it first, 75 years ago. There is essentially zero "how" information coming to us from AlphaFold. This type of reporting is incorrect, and irresponsible to the folks that are still working on that how problem.
- geremiiah 2mo agoYes and correct me if I'm wrong, but they never did deeper work on dynamics. I think that's very telling.
- chermi 2mo agoPissed me off since day one that got by with that "solving" shit. Not to downplay what they did, but it had little to do with the problem as it's been understood to mean. And to be clear I do think it was nobel worthy.
- moralestapia 2mo agoI do not think it was Nobel worthy for Hassam et. al. David Baker is the GOAT of that field, it should have been awarded to him only.
- chermi 2mo agoI know baker's work quite well, no it shouldn't have
- moralestapia 2mo agoCan you name others that deserved it more?
- AntonyGarand 2mo agoTo learn more about AlphaFold and its importance, I would recommend the Veritasium video[0]: AlphaFold - The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_fHJIYENdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_fHJIYENdI
- geremiiah 2mo agoIt's probably because they hit a dead end with their approach in terms of improvements. You can only get so far with trying to model a physical system with an insane number of degrees of freedom from simulation (and augmented) data.
- Legend2440 2mo agoMore likely because the entire Google organization is refocusing on LLMs. Also they already got their nobel prize, so the marketing benefit is already maxed out.
- tim333 2mo agoThey are cracking on with related biology related simulation. Some of it is now proprietary though in Isomorphic Labs.
- chrisjj 2mo agoFalse title. The shutdown is of the AlphaFold team.
- kjsingh 2mo agoguess we need all that compute for AI?
- dumberquestions 2mo agoThe dedicated research team is getting moved to other areas, the Alphafold system itself and its database will likely continue to get maintained, but this means there probably won't be an "Alphafold 4".
- arjie 2mo agoSeems like https://alphafoldserver.com/ https://alphafoldserver.com/ still works. This is about the team working on the product.
- UltraSane 2mo agoGoogle REALLY wants Gemini 4 to be the leading LLM.
- dgellow 2mo agoThey need to justify the capex
- Melatonic 2mo agoGuessing they won't take any of the data or code offline ? Given we have heard a lot about limited compute available at Google internally to employees I would guess they are freeing up resources wherever they can
- effnorwood 2mo agoAlphaFold found to not be actually prize winning.
- paxys 2mo agoJohn Jumper and the rest of the AlphaFold core team left for Anthropic a while ago. And of course Hassabis is handling larger AI efforts at Google. So it was only a matter of time before the effort fell apart.