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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

#401

Post by tsimionescu »

ramon156 wrote: post #318
pythonguython wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any organization/country that has the ability to use a tool like this to create a bio weapon is already sophisticated enough to do bioterrorism today.

Alright, but now picture this: it's now open to the masses, meaning an individual could probably even do it.

The problem of producing bio weapons is not computational, it's physical in nature. Even if predictions from these tools become 100% accurate and encompassed 100% of the chemistry, you still need to actually do the manual steps to breed the bioagents. And, very importantly, you need to do so without getting you and your co-workers deadly ill long before finishing the thing. Which requires extremely sophisticated machinery.

Alternatively, you can go today in some of the poorer corners of the world, find some people with drug resistant tuberculosis, pay them a pittance to give you bodily fluids, and disperse those in a large crowd, say at a concert or similar. You'll get a good chunk of the effects of the worse possible bioterrorism.

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

#402

Post by hackernewds »

lysozyme wrote: post #245

Probably worth mentioning that David Baker’s lab released a similar model (predicts protein structure along with bound DNA and ligands), just a couple of months ago, and it is open source [1]. It’s also worth remembering that it was David Baker who originally came up with the idea of extending AlphaFold from predicting just proteins to predicting ligands as well [2]. 1. https://github.com/baker-laboratory/RoseTTAFold…

Coming up with ideas is cheaper than executing the ideas. Predicting a wide range of molecules okay-ish is cheaper than predicting a small range of molecules very well.

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

#403

Post by stouset »

searealist wrote: post #376
stouset wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be the best we can practically achieve with technology, but the point stands. If positional evaluation says one thing but an exhaustive analysis of lines finds a solution 60 moves deep, that one is going to win.

Humans also do search. Also, engines arent doing an exhaustive search when they are 20 moves deep. They heavily prune.

Yes, I understand how chess engines work.

Ignore the existence of engines for a moment. The reason a particular line works, at the end of the day, is simply because it does. Just because we have heuristics that help us skip a lot of evaluation doesn’t mean the heuristics have intrinsic meaning within the game. They don’t.

They’re shortcuts that let us skip having to do the impossible. The heuristics will always lose to concrete analysis to a deep enough depth.

And that’s my point. We come up with models that give us an intuition for “why” things are a certain way. Those models are inarguably helpful toward having a gut feeling. But models aren’t the thing itself, and every model we’ve found breaks down at some deeper point. And maybe at some level things simply “are” some way with no convenient shorthand explanation.

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

#404

Post by tsimionescu »

consumer451 wrote: post #347
ramon156 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, but now picture this: it's now open to the masses, meaning an individual could probably even do it.

You raise an extremely important point. It appears to me that most people do not understand the implications of your point. Organized terrorism by groups is actually extremely rare. What is much less rare are mass shootings in the USA, by deranged individuals. What would a psychopathic mass shooter type choose as a weapon if he not only had access to semi-automatic weapons, but now we added bio-weapons to the menu? I…

> It seems very clear to me that when creating custom viruses becomes high school level knowledge

That would be very bad indeed, but there is no path from AI to that. Making custom viruses is never going to be an easy task even if you had a magic machine that could explain the effects of adding any chemical to the mix. You still need to procure the chemicals and work with them in very careful ways, often for a long time, in a highly controlled environment. It's still biology lab work, even if you know exactly what you have to do.

Also, bioweapons already exist and have been used in a few conflicts, even as recently as WWII. They're terrifying in many ways, but are not really comparable to the horror of nuclear weapons hitting major cities.

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

#405

Post by hackernewds »

tsimionescu wrote: post #401
ramon156 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, but now picture this: it's now open to the masses, meaning an individual could probably even do it.

The problem of producing bio weapons is not computational, it's physical in nature. Even if predictions from these tools become 100% accurate and encompassed 100% of the chemistry, you still need to actually do the manual steps to breed the bioagents. And, very importantly, you need to do so without getting you and your co-workers deadly ill long before finishing the thing. Which requires extremely sophisticated mach…

These are very specific ideas you have..

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

#406

Post by searealist »

stouset wrote: post #403
searealist wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans also do search. Also, engines arent doing an exhaustive search when they are 20 moves deep. They heavily prune.

Yes, I understand how chess engines work. Ignore the existence of engines for a moment. The reason a particular line works, at the end of the day, is simply because it does . Just because we have heuristics that help us skip a lot of evaluation doesn’t mean the heuristics have intrinsic meaning within the game. They don’t. They’re shortcuts that let us skip having to do the impossible. The heuristics will always lose…

So your point is that we are not omnipotent? Ok.

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

#407

Post by baq »

hackernewds wrote: post #405
tsimionescu wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of producing bio weapons is not computational, it's physical in nature. Even if predictions from these tools become 100% accurate and encompassed 100% of the chemistry, you still need to actually do the manual steps to breed the bioagents. And, very importantly, you need to do so without getting you and your co-workers deadly ill long before finishing the thing. Which requires extremely sophisticated mach…

These are very specific ideas you have..

These are ideas you should read and think about because intelligence agencies all over the world have been thinking about them for the past hundred years.

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

#408

Post by thom »

porphyra wrote: post #381
nybsjytm wrote: post #62

Important caveat: it's only about 70% accurate. Why doesn't the press release say this explicitly? It seems intentionally misleading to only report accuracy relative to existing methods, which apparently are just not so good (30%, 50% in various settings). https://www.fastcompany.com/91120456/deepmind-alphafold-3-dn...

They also had a headline for Alphazero that convinced everyone that they crushed Stockfish and that classical chess engines were stuff of the past, when in fact it was about 50 elo better than the Stockfish version they were testing against, or roughly the same as how much Stockfish improves each year.

And then what happened is AlphaZero changed the professional game in various interesting ways, and all its ideas were absorbed into Stockfish. A little bombast is forgivable for technology that goes on to have a big impact, and I don’t doubt it’s the same story here.

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

#410

Post by moomin »

dekhn wrote: post #213
nybsjytm wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just "Alpha-- models" in general?? That's not a remotely reasonable way to reason about it. Even if it were, why should it stop DeepMind from clearly communicating accuracy?

The way I think about this (specifically, deepmind not publishing their code or sharing their exact experimental results): advanced science is a game played by the most sophisticated actors in the world. Demis is one of those actors, and he plays the games those actors play better than anybody else I've ever seen. Those actors don't care much about the details of any specific system's accuracy: they care to know that…

Anyone remember how he marketed his computer games?
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