These are the type of advances in AI models that I'm excited about because of their potentially beneficial high impact for mankind. Not models that are a better (but less reliable) search engine or coding assistant and email writer. I wish more effort/money was going into this.
AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
171–180 of 193 posts
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of what you said makes sense from the perspective of a product manager working for a for-profit company trying to maximize profit either today or eventually. But the submission blog post writes: > To advance scientific research, we’re making AlphaGenome available in preview via our AlphaGenome API for non-commercial research, and planning to release the model in the future. We believe AlphaGenome can be a valuabl…
To be clear: I agree that opening up model + weights makes it possible for third parties to distill or fine tune If you look at the frenzy of activity that happened after midjourney became accessible, that was awesome for everyone. Midjourney probably got help running their model efficiently and a ton of progress was quickly made. I'm pretty sympathetic to a company doing a windowing strategy: prepare the API as a so…
> serving via API gives them valuable usage data
It might give them a bit, but AFAIK most institutions (especially non-American ones) aren't exactly overly happy about using closed American APIs in order to do science, especially not because API usage isn't reproducible.
Sure, they might be able to play around with some toy data, but for Google to actually get valuable usage data, then they need to let people actually use the thing for real things, and then you cannot gate it behind a API, it isn't feasible in a real-world environment.
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#173I'm somewhat a noob here, but does this model have good understanding of things like OvRFs, methylation, etc, or is it strictly a sequence pattern matching thingy?
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#174I wish there's some breakthrough in cell simulation that would allow us to create simulations that are similarly useful to molecular dynamics but feasible on modern supercomputers. Not being able to see what's happening inside cells seems like the main blocker to biological research.
How can you simulate what is not yet reliably known? Ugh it's so frustrating to hear AI 'thought leaders' going on and on about this being a pancea, especially when a majority of funding for the research even needed to train models has been substantially cut so Elon could have more rocket dollars
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#175I wish there's some breakthrough in cell simulation that would allow us to create simulations that are similarly useful to molecular dynamics but feasible on modern supercomputers. Not being able to see what's happening inside cells seems like the main blocker to biological research.
Simulating the real world at increasingly accurate scales is not that useful, because in biology - more than any other field - our assumptions are incorrect/flawed most of the time. The most useful thing simulations allow us to do is directly test those assumptions and in these cases, the simpler the model the better. Jeremy Gunawardena wrote a great piece on this: https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1…
And the extremely difficult, expensive, and often resultless process of confirming/denying these assumptions is one of the greatest uses of tax dollars and university degrees I can think of, yet, the current admin has taken the perspective that it's all Miasma but also cut the EPA, which by their logic, would stop the Miasma
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#176Demis to be the first to get 4 consecutive nobels
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear: I agree that opening up model + weights makes it possible for third parties to distill or fine tune If you look at the frenzy of activity that happened after midjourney became accessible, that was awesome for everyone. Midjourney probably got help running their model efficiently and a ton of progress was quickly made. I'm pretty sympathetic to a company doing a windowing strategy: prepare the API as a so…
I take most of your points except the last one. The feedback would come in the form of publications, definitely from academia and to a lesser degree industry (admittedly a slow iteration time). Also just public discourse - there was no dearth of very specific, highly technical feedback for any of the releases of alphafold on twitter, for example. But I can’t use this at all at work (a pharma company) because it would…
If it's worth using for you in your work, it might be worth your employer striking a deal about data confidentiality so you can use it.
But you couldn't use it for work anyway because usage is non commercial. So you need to pay them to change the license anyway.
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a strange take because this is consistent with what Google has been doing for a decade with AI. AlphaGo never had the weights released. Nor has any successor (not muzero, the StarCraft one, the protein folding alphafold, nor any other that could reasonably be claimed to be in the series afaik) You can state as a philosophical ideal that you prefer open source or open weights, but that's not something deepmind…
All of what you said makes sense from the perspective of a product manager working for a for-profit company trying to maximize profit either today or eventually. But the submission blog post writes: > To advance scientific research, we’re making AlphaGenome available in preview via our AlphaGenome API for non-commercial research, and planning to release the model in the future. We believe AlphaGenome can be a valuabl…
But to add some historical context.
Similarly with alpha Go they claimed to do it "to advance go" and help go community, but they played Lee se dol, released few curated self play games, collected publicity and abandoned go with no artifacts like source or weights.
But in hindsight their paper turned out to be almost 100% reproducible and resulted in super-human open-source alternative less than a year later.
So the story might repeat here. And they will achieve started goal without releasing anything
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#179You know the corporate screws are coming down hard, when the model (which can be run off a single A100) doesn't get a code release or a weight release, but instead sits behind an API, and the authors say fuck it and copy-paste the entirety of the model code in pseudocode on page 31 of the white paper. Please Google/Demis/Sergei, just release the darn weights. This thing ain't gonna be curing cancer sitting behind an…
Such a strange position to take indeed. I dont see people clamoring behind Apple when they do proprietary things - iMessage protocol, Bluetooth improvements for Airpods, private APIs in Apple Watch.
Apple's "life saving" Apple watch features are only accessible on premium devices. "Privacy is a human right" is also only possible if you buy their devices. It doesnt go around making it free to everyone, and nobody seem to be saying "if you believe in that, then why dont you make it accessible for people from all socio-economic classes?"
Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a main aim at DeepMind. I hope they succeed as it could be very useful.
Do they specifically state that it's their main aim anywhere? Edit: Never mind, I've googled the answer.
It seems that this would be a very coarse-grained simulation of a cell, nowhere close to the usefulness to a proper molecular dynamics simulation, if I understand correctly.