The cost in preventable deaths, had we been continuing protein research instead of pouring the world’s resources into a fancy autocorrect, is incalculable.

Holy shit, that is so fucking stupid. This has so much potential. This is such an anti-human pattern.

Google. The graveyard of projects.

In 2011 Google surreptitiously edited, "don't be evil", from its mission statement. Voila!

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 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.

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.

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.

Another one bites the dust.

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.

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

Do Be Evil

Engadget changed the click bait title.

Google is not shutting down alphafold.

Idiocracy

~~Don't~~ be [maximally] evil.

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?

Sounds like they just moved the research over to isomorphic labs, also even from the onset people quickly took the original approach and paper and made their own versions tuned for their needs.

Feels more like a research project having achieved its goals, the key players moved on, and they're closing the Deepmind part of it as it's not really useful anymore.

they seriously out here shutting down the one universally accepted good this shitshow has brought us?

ffs man

really making it hard for the common person to not fucking hate their guts, between shit like this, data center pollution and the growing mental health crisis of people with cyberpsychosis getting talked into suicide by the llm

edit: shit i got jebaited by the title i think... the project is still available as is but the scientists have been moved to other projects yes?

We pursue AI for the good of humanity my ass

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