Google REALLY wants Gemini 4 to be the leading LLM.
They need to justify the capex
Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#32Is there a lot more work to be done?
There's a fair amount
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pissed me off since day one that got by with that "solving" shit. Not to downplay what they did, but it had little to do with the problem as it's been understood to mean. And to be clear I do think it was nobel worthy.
I do not think it was Nobel worthy for Hassam et. al. David Baker is the GOAT of that field, it should have been awarded to him only.
I know baker's work quite well, no it shouldn't have
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#34As per the article they're slowly shuttering the project, but I assume AlphaFold itself is still available and usable? I assume that AlphaFold isn't perfect, but surely after so many years on it most of the useful juice had been squeezed in terms of making it a useful tool?
google-deepmind/alphafold3: AlphaFold 3 inference pipeline https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold3
And then host then database.
AlphaFold did not yet solve the Folding@home protein folding problem.
Folding@home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#35The obvious question to any business leader is "why?" Why deploy resources to a project? Is this project central to our current or future revenue streams? If not, toss it out.
It has justifiably generated a lot of good will for Google. Applying AI to help science rather than to replace people's jobs. I think this is why you are now seeing OpenAI and Anthropic try to do more science work, but in their case, coming so late, it seems a cynical PR move as opposed to heartfelt from Hassabis.
It seems that Isomorphic Labs is somewhat a continuation of the AlphaFold work, and the first attempt to commercialize it, so maybe they will get more than just good will out of it.
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#36>DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. This is not even close to reality. AlphaFold is not a solution to the protein folding problem, it's (useful) pattern matching to the end state of solved folded protein (in situations that can be p…
Pissed me off since day one that got by with that "solving" shit. Not to downplay what they did, but it had little to do with the problem as it's been understood to mean. And to be clear I do think it was nobel worthy.
Yes, they have a probabilistic model, not an analytical solution.
OTOH I don't think they made up the "solved" label - the CASP benchmark had always considered reaching the AlphaFold level of predictive accuracy (within error tolerance of our ability to experimentally verify via X-ray crystallography etc) as "solving" the problem.
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#37Guessing they won't take any of the data or code offline ?
Given we have heard a lot about limited compute available at Google internally to employees I would guess they are freeing up resources wherever they can
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#38> DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. Is this existing database enough for researchers?
AlphaFold 1 and 2 are open, and freely licensed, weights, and they're still online and downloadable. Alphafold 3 is open weight. I'm guessing Google can't make money on them. You can do more with the weights than just the protein structures. You can design new proteins. So no, the database is not enough. But the weights and a university cluster are enough.
> I'm guessing Google can't make money on them.
The weights are free for non-commercial use. And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies.
Edit: after reading the article, I realise it's about the disbanding of the team, so probably your original comment is correct.
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#39Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#40AlphaFold found to not be actually prize winning.