Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 504 posts

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

#471

Post by AlexCoventry »

kriro wrote: post #419
porphyra wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Alphazero is a lot more interesting than Stockfish though. Most notably it lead me to reevaluate positional play. Iirc A0 at around 2-3 ply is still above SuperGM Level which is pretty mind-blowing. Based on this I have increased my strategy to tactics ratio quite a bit. FWIW Stockfish is always evolving and adapting and has incorporated ideas from A0.

How do you train for strategic thinking in chess? I read a book on positional chess once, but that's as far as I've gone.

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

#472

Post by GaggiX »

thom wrote: post #408
porphyra wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>all its ideas were absorbed into Stockfish

That's not true at all, Stockfish still uses only human heuristics for search and NNUE for eval, a completely different architecture than alphazero and derived from the Yu Nasu Shogi engine.

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

#473

Post by AlexCoventry »

datadeft wrote: post #416
falcor84 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closer it gets to enabling full drug discovery, the closer it also gets to enabling bioterrorism. Taking it to the extreme, if they had the theory of everything, I don't think I'd want it to be made available to the whole world as it is today. On a related note, I highly recommend The Talos Principle 2, which really made me think about these questions.

Why on Earth would any terrorist want to invest into this when you can just purchase guns and explosives much easier?

Because a pathogen could potentially sicken or kill many more people.

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

#474

Post by LeanderK »

theGnuMe wrote: post #287
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…

And that tech just got $1b in funding.

can you expand? Who got 1bn of funding?

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

#475

Post by FeepingCreature »

bronco21016 wrote: post #440
FeepingCreature wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll live in the harmless society, you go live in the harmful society.

We all live in the harmful society already right? I’m not aware of where to find this harmless society. Suffering of finite beings is inevitable. While a very worthwhile goal, creating a harmless civilization isn’t possible. There are some common sense things we should do to prevent harm like negative consequences (prison etc) for needlessly harming each other. However, locking up knowledge doesn’t make much sense to…

I don't care about people harming people incidentally. I also don't want to shut down knowledge. But there is "knowledge" and there are "materials" that everyone agrees must be controlled and limited, like high explosives and bioweapons. Then the question is if large AI weights are a kind of "knowledge" or a kind of "material", and IMO they're much closer to material despite being data.

> I’d rather explore the bounds of this world than mindlessly collect my drip of Soma and live comatose. To me that sounds more harmful.

This only once again demonstrates that winning a debate is entirely about getting to define the choice under consideration. To me, it's not about Soma, it's about "humanity survives" and "humanity goes extinct due to out-of-control superintelligence." I don't want to die, so I'm for AI regulation.

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

#476

Post by uptownfunk »

DrScientist wrote: post #449
abecedarius wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that they did release the AlphaFold 2 weights after a while. Milking an expensive discovery for a limited period should be considered laudable, unless you think tax funding of all research would be awesome and it's just a weird anomaly how the org producing these results was a tiny heterodox startup very recently.

> Worth noting that they did release the AlphaFold 2 weights after a while. Yes - though I don't think Isomorphic labs existed at that point. Obviously the real reason AlphaFold was possible was the huge tax payer funded effort running over decades to generate a diverse, high quality 3D structure dataset. However that's why we put taxes into research - to spur innovation in a pre-competitive way - so that's fine. Wha…

You know I can appreciate that. For some reason because it’s related to medicine, it feels insidious to keep it closed.

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

#477

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

uptownfunk wrote: post #176

Very sad to see they did not make it open source. When you have a technology that has the potential to be a gateway for drug development, to the cures of new diseases, and instead you choose to make it closed, it is a very huge disservice to the community at large. Sure, release your own product alongside it, but making it closed source does not help the scientific community upon which all these innovations were buil…

I'd be willing to bet that OpenFold has an implementation inside of a few months.

https://openfold.io/

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

#478

Post by jltsiren »

strogonoff wrote: post #388
jltsiren wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find that argument convincing. People clearly have been able to discover many underlying principles using the scientific method. Then they have been able to explain and predict many complex phenomena using the discovered principles, and create even more complex phenomena based on that. Complex phenomena such as the technology we are using for this discussion. Words dont have any inherent meaning, just the mea…

> The kind of absolute truth you are talking about may make sense when discussing philosophy or religion. Exactly—except you are talking about it, too. When you say “discovering underlying principles”, you are implying the idea of absolute truth where there is none—the principles are not discovered, they are modeled, and that model is our fallible human construct. It’s a similar mistake as where you wrote “explain”:…

Now we come back to words gaining their meaning from usage.

You are assigning meanings to words like "discovering", "principles", and "explain" that other people don't share. Particularly people doing science. Because these absolute philosophical meanings are impossible in the real world, they are also useless when discussing the reality. Reserving common words for impossible concepts would not make sense. It would only hinder communication.

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

#479

Post by thom »

GaggiX wrote: post #472
thom wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>all its ideas were absorbed into Stockfish That's not true at all, Stockfish still uses only human heuristics for search and NNUE for eval, a completely different architecture than alphazero and derived from the Yu Nasu Shogi engine.

It's a neural network trained on self-play games (many of them lifted from Leela Zero). I get that it's a different shape of network, but people really seem touchy about crediting Google with the kick up the bum that led us here. AlphaZero had a massive effect on chess globally, whatever people think about its press releases. My main point is that people should update the heuristic that wastes energy arguing about bold claims when clearly something amazing has happened that everyone in the industry will react to and learn from.

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

#480

Post by andy_ppp »

jasondigitized wrote: post #340
andy_ppp wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if we get to the stage of being able to simulate every chemical and electrical reaction in a human brain, is doing this torture or wrong?

So the Matrix?

The brains were in “the real” in the Matrix or did I not watch it closely enough :-)
Post reply on HN