this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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It literally just won people two Nobel prizes
How does that help the rest of us?
It allows us to predict the structure of proteins before we make them. This can speed up research into protein-based medical treatments by astronomical amounts-- drugs which took years to develop through trial and error and/or thousands of hours of computational power can now be predicted beforehand in terms of their structure, which allows us to predict how they interact woth the proteins in our body. It's an incredible breakthrough in the speed of medical research.
with the compute power required for models like alphafold, my guess is it will be at the monopoly of some corporation which will charge exorbitant prices for any drugs it develops through AI. Not a fault of AI itself, just fucking parasitic shareholder pigs which we should have eaten long ago.
Damn I hope not but yeah probably :(
It's hype like this that breaks the back of the public when "AI doesn't change anything". Don't get me wrong: AlphaFold has done incredible things. We can now create computational models of proteins in a few hours instead of a decade. But the difference between a computational model and the actual thing is like the difference between a piece of cheese and yellow plastic: they both melt nicely but you'd never want one of them in your quesadilla.
Hooray for them. \s