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AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

deepmind.com

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Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#3

Post by partingshots »

I continue to be impressed by how quickly DeepMind has managed to progress in such a short time. CASP13 was a shocker to all of us I think, but many were skeptical as to the longevity of the performance DeepMind was able to achieve. I believe with CASP14 rankings now released, it's safe to say that they've proven themselves.

Congratulations to the team! This work will have far reaching impacts, and I hope that you continue to invest heavily in this area of research.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#5

Post by whimsicalism »

partingshots wrote: post #3

I continue to be impressed by how quickly DeepMind has managed to progress in such a short time. CASP13 was a shocker to all of us I think, but many were skeptical as to the longevity of the performance DeepMind was able to achieve. I believe with CASP14 rankings now released, it's safe to say that they've proven themselves. Congratulations to the team! This work will have far reaching impacts, and I hope that you co…

Progress like this was, in my view, inevitable after the invention of unsupervised transformers.

It'll be genetics next.

e: although AlphaFold appears to be convolutionally based! I suspect that'll change soon.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#7

Post by the8472 »

partingshots wrote: post #3

I continue to be impressed by how quickly DeepMind has managed to progress in such a short time. CASP13 was a shocker to all of us I think, but many were skeptical as to the longevity of the performance DeepMind was able to achieve. I believe with CASP14 rankings now released, it's safe to say that they've proven themselves. Congratulations to the team! This work will have far reaching impacts, and I hope that you co…

> but many were skeptical as to the longevity of the performance DeepMind was able to achieve

For a non-biologist, on what is this skepticism based?

Just purely based on following ML news it looks like the trend for ML solutions has been that they've overtaken expert-systems once they've gained a solid foodhold in a field. Maybe this is some perception bias. Are there any cases where ML performed decently but then hit a ceiling while expert systems kept improving?

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#8

Post by whimsicalism »

the8472 wrote: post #7
partingshots wrote: post #3

I continue to be impressed by how quickly DeepMind has managed to progress in such a short time. CASP13 was a shocker to all of us I think, but many were skeptical as to the longevity of the performance DeepMind was able to achieve. I believe with CASP14 rankings now released, it's safe to say that they've proven themselves. Congratulations to the team! This work will have far reaching impacts, and I hope that you co…

> but many were skeptical as to the longevity of the performance DeepMind was able to achieve For a non-biologist, on what is this skepticism based? Just purely based on following ML news it looks like the trend for ML solutions has been that they've overtaken expert-systems once they've gained a solid foodhold in a field. Maybe this is some perception bias. Are there any cases where ML performed decently but then hi…

ML is a super overloaded term.

There are definitely cases where machine learned statistical solutions do not perform as well as the systems tuned by the experts, but if you can define the task well and get the data for a deep solution, usually those will overtake.

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