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.
businesses don’t sell products anymore, they sell subscriptions to their products.
leave the poor billionaires alone!
Holy shit, that is so fucking stupid. This has so much potential. This is such an anti-human pattern.
alphafold isn’t sunsetting, they are dismantling the original research team. its still active and being worked on
Logical response. Won’t be upvoted by many.
Illogical comment. Might not be up voted by many.
Gibberish. Woltucdajbdss ghsssj. Gdsgn. Xrngvsas
Gesundheit
Spam, spam spam spam spam spam.
Stupid response, will be downvoted by many lmao
It looks like the open source project is dead and Google has transferred only some of the researchers to a for-profit pharmaceutical-to-be company.
This company appears to have gotten $600 million thanks to Jared Kushner’s brother back in 2025
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?”
As Trump would say, “who knew healthcare could be so hard?”, at least french people know how to protest…
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.
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.
I think they’ll just be used to force VDI on consumers.
Which is a shame, because VDI could be amazing for consumers, but it won’t be.
Well, you see, there are dozens of adhesive manufacturers willing to pay for advertising or top indexing, while any medical research that could incidentally mention gender or race has its funding set on fire by the US government.
“Finish nailer will get it through warranty and then it’s not our problem.”
- Home builders
So the actually useful product gets shit down for the useless product
Useful for humans. Not for robots and reptiles.
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.
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.
I remember using Google Now on my Galaxy Nexus a lot and actually finding it useful. Then Google pushed for Assistant and it was a dumpster fire. Glad to see that big G is still up to the same shenanigans.
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.
The radio was originally imagined to be a public education and cultural broadcast system. Instead it broadcast Amos and Andy.
That was the plan all along. Maybe people should (re) watch The Selfish Ledger
always has been like that
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.
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.
It’s a actually fairly similar to LLMs architecturally. Tokens go in, pretrained transformers do black box magic, tokens come out.
Advancements in one may very well carry over to the other so maybe there’ll be an alphafold 4 one day but for now universities have access to 3 and can run it if they have the compute.
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…
What I mean is I thought it was implied that AlphaFold is shutting down because Gemini can simply continue the work better.
AlphaFold is Google’s AI approach to protein folding…
I meant that I thought they were merging the two if Gemini could simply do what AlphaFold had been doing.
Gemini is a completely different project.
The term “AI” is rather overloaded these days.
AlphaFold uses a combination of machine learning and physics simulations to predict the shape of a protein given its chemical formula.
Gemini is a Large Language Model which uses machine learning to predict text completion.
They both use “machine learning” but the machine learning models are wildly different. Machine learning is a technique that’s basically a fancy curve fitting approach. The curve AlphaFold is trained to mimic maps chemical formulas to shapes, while the curve Gemini mimics maps a text input to probabilities for predictions of the next letter(s).
Do Be Evil
Don’t Be EvilDon’t Do Good Things
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
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”.
Absolutely true. Tech companies and others love to conflate them. It’s also a money thing: Idiots with too much money (that we should probably tax to use for something useful) want to invest in AI, so if I’ve been working on a project that needs funds, I just rebrand it as “AI”, even if it just runs on more traditional ML principles.
The model itself is structurally very similar to LLMs. It’s just that the tokens aren’t words.
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.
