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.
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.
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
alphafold isn’t sunsetting, they are dismantling the original research team. its still active and being worked on
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
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.
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.
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).
