Nobel committee is all in on the AI hype this year!
Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
51–60 of 343 posts
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#52Did Demis Hasabis actually do any scientific work himself?
He is a chemist now.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#53David Baker (and colleagues) have always done good work. I guess google have done some things also. (lol - one of the PDF attachments to that page is 'Illustration: A string of amino acids' : actually it's a bit better than the title implies :). Actually, Figure 2 - "How does AlfaFold2 Work?" is impressive to fit that on one page. Nice.
It is well known around here that Baker does very, very little of the work. He is extremely good at putting his name on his students' work though (this is par for the course in academia)... and removing theirs (this is the bad part). At least he bribes them with lots of happy hours!
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didnt give the award to the paper
The paper represents the work which lead to the prize. if A=B and A=C, then A=C
Not all of the work. For example, it doesn't account for the fact that Demis Hassabis, as head of DeepMind, undoubtedly recruited many of the co-authors to participate in this effort, which is worth something when it comes to the final output.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#55Here's a direct quote from the Alphafold paper: "These authors contributed equally: John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Žídek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl, Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, Demis Hassabis"
The nature of scientific work has changed significantly since 1895, when the Nobel Prizes were established. 100 years ago, lots of scientific work really were driven forward largely by a singular person. That's rarely true today for groundbreaking research. I don't know if this means the Nobel needs to change or we need a another prize that reflects the collaborative work of modern science.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#56And, at the heart of AlphaFold2 is the language model, the tip of the spear in AI today. 'Language' can come in many forms e.g. a protein or amino acid sequence.
Alpha* is not LLM-based, it's Q-learning based
AlphaFold 2 wasn't Q-learning based. It was supervised SGD and the "evoformer" they introduced is very close to a transformer. So it's not exactly an LLM, but it's a pretty close equivalent for protein data.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#57Here's a direct quote from the Alphafold paper: "These authors contributed equally: John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Žídek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl, Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, Demis Hassabis"
And further down: ” Contributions J.J. and D.H. led the research. J.J., R.E., A. Pritzel, M.F., O.R., R.B., A. Potapenko, S.A.A.K., B.R.-P., J.A., M.P., T. Berghammer and O.V. developed the neural network architecture and training. T.G., A.Ž., K.T., R.B., A.B., R.E., A.J.B., A.C., S.N., R.J., D.R., M.Z. and S.B. developed the data, analytics and inference systems. D.H., K.K., P.K., C.M. and E.C. managed the research.…
These people aren't in the "These authors contributed equally" list.
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#58Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#59The 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 dem…
The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public. It has a kind of late 19th century progressive humanistic ethos. It's science outreach. This way, at least once a year, the everyday layperson hears about scientific discoveries. The Nobel isn't a vehicle to recognize hundreds of thousands of deeply technical scientific researchers. How could it be? They have to pick a symbolic figurehead to represent a breakthrough. Th…
> The Nobel prize is aimed at the general public...
Which is okay. The Nobel prize is okay.
> This way, at least once a year, the everyday layperson hears about scientific discoveries.
Spot on.
The problem we have is that the everyday layperson hears very little about scientific discoveries. The scientists themselves, one in a million of them, can get a Nobel prize. The rest, if they are lucky, get a somewhat okay salary. Sometimes better than that of a software engineer. Almost always worse working hours.
But I suppose it's all for the best. Imagine a world where a good scientist, one that knows everything about biology and protein folding, gets to avoid cancer and even aging, while the everyday layperson can only go to the doctor...
Re: Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
#60While I am skeptical about yesterdays award in physics, these are totally deserved and spot on. There are few approaches that will accelerate the field of drug development and chemistry as a whole in a way that the works of these three people will. Congratulations!
Are they? What did Demis do?
He writes software in different areas, so he has the potential to get a Nobel prize in any area soon.