John Jumper and the rest of the AlphaFold core team left for Anthropic a while ago. And of course Hassabis is handling larger AI efforts at Google. So it was only a matter of time before the effort fell apart.
Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The weights are free for non-commercial use.
Nope. Alphafold 1 & 2 can be used for whatever you want. Also this has resulted in them being used to train better models than Alphafold 3.
> And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies.
Yep. And given how Pharma works, being the "descendants" of Nobel-prize winning research I'm sad to say this will probably work and pay pretty well (not by Google standards, but by anyone else's standard, pretty well), despite the fact that there are better models.
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kind of solution you want may not be possible . There is no guarantee that a tractable method exists to analytically invert protein folding. Data-driven methods like alphafold may be the only option.
This has nothing to do with what I am talking about.
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Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#44It's probably because they hit a dead end with their approach in terms of improvements. You can only get so far with trying to model a physical system with an insane number of degrees of freedom from simulation (and augmented) data.
They are cracking on with related biology related simulation. Some of it is now proprietary though in Isomorphic Labs.
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#45Earlier 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.
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.
CASP is explicitly structure prediction. That's not the folding problem.
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know baker's work quite well, no it shouldn't have
Can you name others that deserved it more?
For what? I thought your trying to argue only baker deserved solo compared to what happened?
If you're asking about solving the actual folding problem? Probably Dill, Onuchic, Wolynes, maybe Sosnick would be top of my list off the top of my head. Anfinsen if he was alive.
Re: Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
CASP is explicitly structure prediction. That's not the folding problem.
Yes, but in the AlphaFold documentary they did explicitly mention "solving" CASP as the target.