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AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

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Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#121
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also no commercial use, from the paper: > AlphaFold 3 will be available as a non-commercial usage only server at https://www.alphafoldserver.com , with restrictions on allowed ligands and covalent modifications. Pseudocode describing the algorithms is available in the Supplementary Information. Code is not provided.

How easy/hard would be for the scientific community to come up with an "OpenFold" model which is pretty much AF3 but fully open source and without restrictions in it? I can image training will be expensive, but I don't think it will be at a GPT-4 level of expensive.

already did it, https://openfold.io/ https://github.com/aqlaboratory/openfold https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.20.517210v1 https://lupoglaz.github.io/OpenFold2/ https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/openfold-biotech-a...

I really have to emphasize that transformers have literally transformed science in only a few years. Truly extraordinary.

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#122

Stepping back, the high-order bit here is an ML method is beating physically-based methods for accurately predicting the world. What happens when the best methods for computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, nuclear physics are all uninterpretable ML models? Does this decouple progress from our current understanding of the scientific process - moving to better and better models of the world without human-int…

It makes me think about how Einstein was famous for making falsifiable real-world predictions to accompany his theoretical work. And, sometimes it took years for proper experiments to be run (such as measuring a solar eclipse during the breakout of a world war). Perhaps the opportunity here is to provide a quicker feedback loop for theory about predictions in the real world. Almost like unit tests.

Agreed. At the very least, models of this nature let us iterate/filter our theories a little bit more quickly.

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#123
post #12

From: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01383-z >Unlike RoseTTAFold and AlphaFold2, scientists will not be able to run their own version of AlphaFold3, nor will the code underlying AlphaFold3 or other information obtained after training the model be made public. Instead, researchers will have access to an ‘AlphaFold3 server’, on which they can input their protein sequence of choice, alongside a selection of…

The second amendment prevents the government's overreaching perversion to restrict me from having the ability to print biological weapons from the comfort of my couch. Google has no such restriction.

Sergey once said "We don't have an army per-se" (he was referring the size of Google's physical security group) at TGIF.

There was a nervous chuckle from the audience.

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#124
post #120

Stepping back, the high-order bit here is an ML method is beating physically-based methods for accurately predicting the world. What happens when the best methods for computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, nuclear physics are all uninterpretable ML models? Does this decouple progress from our current understanding of the scientific process - moving to better and better models of the world without human-int…

It means we now have an accurate surrogate model or "digital twin" that can be experimented on almost instantaneously. So we can massively accelerate the traditional process of developing mechanistic understanding through experiment, while also immediately be able to benefit from the ability to make accurate predictions, even without needing understanding. In reality, science has already pretty much gone this way lon…

instead of "in mice", we'll be able to say "in the cloud"

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#125
post #90
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also no commercial use, from the paper: > AlphaFold 3 will be available as a non-commercial usage only server at https://www.alphafoldserver.com , with restrictions on allowed ligands and covalent modifications. Pseudocode describing the algorithms is available in the Supplementary Information. Code is not provided.

Yes, because that's going to stop competitors.. it's why they didn't release code I guess. This is yet another large part of a biotech related Gutenberg moment.

The DeepMind team was essentially forced to publish and release an earlier iteration of AlphaFold after the Rosetta team effectively duplicated their work and published a paper about it in Science. Meanwhile, the Rosetta team just published a similar work about co-folding ligands and proteins in Science a few weeks ago. These are hardly the only teams working in this space - I would expect progress to be very fast in the next few years.

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#126

Stepping back, the high-order bit here is an ML method is beating physically-based methods for accurately predicting the world. What happens when the best methods for computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, nuclear physics are all uninterpretable ML models? Does this decouple progress from our current understanding of the scientific process - moving to better and better models of the world without human-int…

I wonder if ML can someday be employed in deciphering such black box problems; a second model that can look under the hood at all the number crunching performed by the predictive model, identify the pattern that resulted in a prediction, and present it in a way we can understand.

That said, I don’t even know if ML is good at finding patterns in data.

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#127

Stepping back, the high-order bit here is an ML method is beating physically-based methods for accurately predicting the world. What happens when the best methods for computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, nuclear physics are all uninterpretable ML models? Does this decouple progress from our current understanding of the scientific process - moving to better and better models of the world without human-int…

We need to advance mechanistic interpretability (field reverse engineering neural networks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7sjVMtb5Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t9umZ1tFso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rdp9GvcYOE

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#128

This reminds me of Google’s claim that another “AI” discovered millions of new materials. The results turned out to be a lot of useless noise but that was only apparent after actual expert spent hundreds of hours reviewed the results[0] 0: https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-o...

> We have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds in the GNoME and Stable Structure listings, although we anticipate that there must be some among the 384,870 compositions. We also note that, while many of the new compositions are trivial adaptations of known materials, the computational approach delivers credible overall compositions, which gives us confidence that the underlying approach is sound.

Doesn't seem outright useless.

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#129
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks a bit. I was just wondering why they are touting that 3rd party company in their own blog post, who commercialise research tools, as well. Maybe there are some corporate agreements with them that prevents them from opening the system... Imagine the goodwill for humanity for releasing these pure research systems for free. I just have a hard time understanding how you can motivate to keep it closed. Let's ho…

- "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 structur…

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.

Re: AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules

#130
post #24

From: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01383-z >Unlike RoseTTAFold and AlphaFold2, scientists will not be able to run their own version of AlphaFold3, nor will the code underlying AlphaFold3 or other information obtained after training the model be made public. Instead, researchers will have access to an ‘AlphaFold3 server’, on which they can input their protein sequence of choice, alongside a selection of…

Also no commercial use, from the paper: > AlphaFold 3 will be available as a non-commercial usage only server at https://www.alphafoldserver.com , with restrictions on allowed ligands and covalent modifications. Pseudocode describing the algorithms is available in the Supplementary Information. Code is not provided.

What's the point in that that - I mean who does non-commercial drug research?
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