Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold

ChrisArchitect

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096841

vicapow

Is there a lot more work to be done?

thaumasiotes

> DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold. > In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. Why is there no information on corroborations of the predictions? Anyone can make predictions. Surely there must have been teams picking predicted structures out of the database and comparing them to actual molecules?

jrflo

> DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. Is this existing database enough for researchers?

BariumBlue

As per the article they're slowly shuttering the project, but I assume AlphaFold itself is still available and usable? I assume that AlphaFold isn't perfect, but surely after so many years on it most of the useful juice had been squeezed in terms of making it a useful tool?

dude250711

They realised it's time... Gemini to follow?

balozi

The obvious question to any business leader is "why?" Why deploy resources to a project? Is this project central to our current or future revenue streams? If not, toss it out.

colingauvin

>DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. This is not even close to reality. AlphaFold is not a solution to the protein folding problem, it's (useful) pattern matching to the end state of solved folded protein (in situations that can be pattern matched). If this is considered "solving the protein folding problem" then X-ray crystallography solved it first, 75 years ago. There is essentially zero "how" information coming to us from AlphaFold. This type of reporting is incorrect, and irresponsible to the folks that are still working on that how problem.

AntonyGarand

To learn more about AlphaFold and its importance, I would recommend the Veritasium video[0]: AlphaFold - The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_fHJIYENdI

geremiiah

It's probably because they hit a dead end with their approach in terms of improvements. You can only get so far with trying to model a physical system with an insane number of degrees of freedom from simulation (and augmented) data.

chrisjj

False title. The shutdown is of the AlphaFold team .

kjsingh

guess we need all that compute for AI?

dumberquestions

The dedicated research team is getting moved to other areas, the Alphafold system itself and its database will likely continue to get maintained, but this means there probably won't be an "Alphafold 4".

arjie

Seems like https://alphafoldserver.com/ still works. This is about the team working on the product.

UltraSane

Google REALLY wants Gemini 4 to be the leading LLM.

Melatonic

Guessing they won't take any of the data or code offline ? Given we have heard a lot about limited compute available at Google internally to employees I would guess they are freeing up resources wherever they can

effnorwood

AlphaFold found to not be actually prize winning.

paxys

John Jumper and the rest of the AlphaFold core team left for Anthropic a while ago. And of course Hassabis is handling larger AI efforts at Google. So it was only a matter of time before the effort fell apart.