This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Holy shit, that is so fucking stupid. This has so much potential. This is such an anti-human pattern.
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!
alphafold isn't sunsetting, they are dismantling the original research team. its still active and being worked on
In 2011 Google surreptitiously edited, "don't be evil", from its mission statement. Voila!
So instead of continuing a project that could cure diseases and help understand human biology they'll focus on a system I use for asking questions like "What adhesive is best to attaching siding trim?"
At this point in time ai is just a data gathering tool
Exactly. No offense to the average liberal but this whole "but what will happen to all the compute and data centers when the AI bubble bursts" is so tiring.
Firstly, the fascist regime will absolutely bail out a few key companies. Secondly, all those centers will be used for mass surveillance, war games, predictive policing (and population control), and all the other shit in the fascist grabbag.
There is absolutely a level of speculation to this insane bubble. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to ignore the evidence of your eyes. Obviously there is an aspect of short sighted money chasing (pretty standard capitalist bs), and there is absolutely an aspect of corporate greed and the companies trying to outbuild, outcompute one another. But for the people at the top (Miller, Thiel, Elston, Musk maybe, and others), they absolutely have long term goals. They are definitely getting rich off the bubble and benefiting from the short term insanity, but there is more there.
These neofeudalist assholes want to see us in chains, under their ever watchful AI eyes.
So the actually useful product gets shit down for the useless product
So I finally let my Android Auto update from Google Assistant to Gemini, which it's been wanting for months.
First thing I did was prompt it to play a specific artist, just like I do at least once a week since it forces me to use the voice activation instead of the on screen keyboard, even when there are passengers that can type. It responded saying it is not capable of playing music at all. Wtf.
So I then rephrase and tell it to play the artist on YouTube Music... And it does so, but doesn't get the artist even close to correct. I had to prompt it 5 times with varying emphasis to get it to finally get it right.
So literally the first thing it did wa like to me... and then it worked correctly less than 20% of the time... So much better than the Assistant it replaced that never gave me a problem. Totally better.
My car with Google assistant interrupted my conversation with my girlfriend yesterday and started giving me a haiku very loudly for no reason. I guess it was listening and thought we said haiku...
At least it made us laugh. But technology is ridiculous right now. So much shit we don't want or need.
Even more scarier: it’s listening when you don’t know or want to
It has to do that to know when you say a keyword like "hey Google". I just wonder what other keywords it's listening to and using to serve ads or profile me as a user.
Same thing with swapping to Gemini on the phone. First thing and only thing I asked for was to set a reminder alarm. But Gemini couldn't talk to the clock app and refused. In the trash it went.
It’s kind of a marvel that we all have the bulk of human knowledge at our fingertips, and instead of noble pursuits we largely use it for social manipulation and power grabs.
I guess there is just more population control in misinformation than there is in curing disease.
So they want the chat bot that lies instead of the science machine that cures cancers.
Wouldn't expect any less from the company that removed "Dont be evil" from its company charter.
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.
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.
How are there like 3 positive comments on this article? Is Engaget primarily for dummies?
Jumper announced in June that he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic.
Key people were leaving.
Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, which is a DeepMind spin-off.
It's not as bad as the headline makes it sound.
A tragedy has befallen humanity.
amazing work
it's crazy. some of this went from taking years to now taking minutes and people react negative because it's using machine learning and AI.
Thank you Google.
This is fundamentally different than chat bots and the anti-AI movement needs to learn this to be effective.
don't blame the anti-AI movement for conflating when it was places like Google that purposely marketed LLMs as AI.
ofc people will confuse the two and just say "fuck all AI".
Idiocracy
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
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.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t AlphaFold basically solve protein folding, as in their master database of folds is now complete? Doesn’t it make sense to move on at this point?
We pursue AI for the good of humanity my ass
