The usefulness of alphafold had been grossly overstated by science media. The structures it generates are mostly nonsense, they typically can’t generate molecular dynamics simulation trajectories with the correct physical properties, which makes them not useful for drug discovery. in computational biology today you’ll most often find them in use as a starting point for structure refinement or as one of many sources of data for some integrative method. Again, not useless, and an improvement over previous structure prediction algorithms, but they didn’t ‘solve protein folding’ or anything, like Google might have you believe. I don’t put much stock in Nobel prizes, I mean, they gave one to Henry Kissinger.
Google also released alphafold 3 under a strict non commercial license, which severely limited its usefulness for both commercial and academic work, the latter of which all but requires using more permissive licenses. I assume Google wanted to monetize a commercial version of it at some point.
I’ve been using Openfold 3 in some work I’ve been doing recently, and while the software is a bit undercooked, it does produce structures similar to alphafold 3 without any of Google’s bullshit. So I wouldn’t worry too much about this announcement. The protein folding will continue with or without them
Though it does suck that attention is being diverted to LLM development because it’s so good at giving the illusion of being smart while still getting so much wrong.
In 2011 Google surreptitiously edited, “don’t be evil”, from its mission statement. Voila!
As Macron would say, “who would have guessed capitalism is evil?”
so letting a person own their own company is evil? we just hand it to the government?
this is about greed not capitalism… which is private ownership. our government is just as greedy
Yes, letting a person own a means of production leads to greed and they, unlike government, are not able to be voted out. They just grow more powerful and stupid drunk on wealth and they do stupid shit that destroys economies and environments and societies and surround themselves with yes men so they never have to hear about the consequences of their actions from anyone “important”.
Elon musk should not own the space program. Jeff Bezos should not own all retail. Palmer Luckey should be “disrupting” defense.
You are not a capitalist, you are a worker with Stockholm syndrome. Fuck capitalism, it’s time for it to go. It’s antiquated and unnecessary.
As Trump would say, “who knew healthcare could be so hard?”, at least french people know how to protest…
The cost in preventable deaths, had we been continuing protein research instead of pouring the world’s resources into a fancy autocorrect, is incalculable.
Honestly they could’ve pointed AI at this problem to try and rack up at least some positive AI press coverage
But… Alpha fold is AI.
Actual, real, machine-learning artificial-intelligence. Not this sycophantic human mimic shit everybody’s fallen head over heels for. At the very bare-minimum comparison, AlphaFold had an established use-case.
But you need to understand, preventing deaths doesn’t make Google any money. Please think about the poor corporation!
I think this is a miscalculation on Google’s part because dead people can’t buy their products.
People don’t buy products anymore. They’re too poor to care about. Businesses sell to governments and other businesses now and couldn’t care less what you want or think.
Idiocracy
Holy shit, that is so fucking stupid. This has so much potential. This is such an anti-human pattern.
How are there like 3 positive comments on this article? Is Engaget primarily for dummies?
Good to know. I’ll continue not really going here lol
Google. The graveyard of projects.
They are killing Google earth desktop application.
Pls tell me this won’t affect google earth VR on steam. It’s amazing!
I installed Google Earth on every machine (thanks ninite) since it came out and think I only opened it a few times during the first year to show it to people lol
We pursue AI for the good of humanity my ass
Sorry it didn’t fit with the narrative of genocidal maniacs.
We just need a blanket ban on generative AI. The societal costs are just too high, we can’t bear it. We can continue on our path like this for years and dig ourselves into a deeper hole before admitting it, or we could just admit it now and save ourselves the pain.
I know what I would vote.
They prioritized a BOWKY, what a shame.
Engadget changed the click bait title.
Google is not shutting down alphafold.
New title: Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team
Although the url slug still says:
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/
There is no story here, the original Alphafold team was moving to the private pharma service version of Alphafold. alpha fold continues, nothing is shut down.
Engadget should stick to iphone reviews.
Funny, one of the first arguments I had about AI was with someone who insisted it would be incredibly helpful at predicting protein folds.
That person was right: https://medicine.iu.edu/blogs/research-updates/the-protein-folding-problem-the-day-ai-unlocked-a-secret-of-life
So this may be why Google is closing AlphaFold; AI is already doing it.
So this may be why Google is closing AlphaFold; AI is already doing it.
If you have no idea what Alphafold is, why comment on it. Fucking Lemmy…
To be clear, I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing about AI’s utility, just about how protein fold AI isn’t the same as LLM AI; we’ve used computer models for predictions of protein structure and genetic mutation severity for a while, though they have always been taken with a grain of salt that I fear is no longer being done - a prediction is still a prediction, after all. Doctors were already incorrectly confusing computer model predictions of genetic mutation severity for positive test results back when I was working as a genetic counselor in the 2010’s - my concern is that the widespread trust of “AI” is only going to exacerbate that.
I’m a bit confused, though. The AI doing it was AlphaFold, which is shutting down. Shouldn’t your statement be AI was already doing it? Gemini is an LLM - not the same type of thing as AlphaFold, despite the fact that they’re both called “AI,” which was the cause of my original argument. The AI that was doing the protein fold prediction is being replaced with an “AI” that can’t. It looks like there’s still RoseTTAFold, but losing the frontrunner is still not great when it’s shutting down to focus more on LLM’s.
The article also talks about a spinoff of AlphaFold……
I didn’t click into what that spinoff was but maybe an even better headline is “for profit company creates a free AI to predict protein folding and is moving to monetize it”
Higher versions of Alphafold will be a service for biotech an pharma to buy.
Did not realise the point google dropt the act of pretending to be good and went full evil mode.
Remember actually liking the little jokes they made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rznYifPHxDg
Unfortunately, they’ve been full-on evil for at least a decade.
