Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction

Next up: The Nobel peace prize is awarded to ChatGPT, because virtually all communiques and peace treaties will be generated by lazy lawyers.

Did Demis Hasabis actually do any scientific work himself?

Well deserved! Especially for Alphafold. It is the most impactful invention in structural biology this century along with Cryo-EM.

Are they? What did Demis do?

The AlphaFold paper has countless authors, many researchers and company resources underlying it. Hassabis’ contribution is management of resources and entrepreneurship, not the actual science. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists out there doing deep technical work, and they aren’t recognized.

I think we might be the end of it, as the emphasis shifts to commercialization and product development.

These AI demonstrations require so many GPUs, specialized hardware and data that nobody has but the biggest players. Moreover, they are engineering work, not really scientistic (putting together a lot of hacks and tweaks). Meanwhile, the person who led the transformer paper (a key ingredient in LLMs) hasn’t been recognized.

This will incentivize scientists to focus on management of other researchers who will manage other researchers who will produce the technical inventions. The same issue arises with citations and indices, and the general reward structure in academia.

The signal these AI events convey to me: You better focus on practical stuff, and you better move on in the management ladder.