Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project
- Reference: 0184755226
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/07/29/2053245/google-shuts-down-its-nobel-prize-winning-alphafold-project
- Source link:
> AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It's now [3]being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
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> 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.
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> In 2021, Nature published the [4]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 [5]AlphaFold Protein Structure Database , giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/61b2953d-ee0d-45de-af6e-a9c1cf524b33?syn-25a6b1a6=1
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590123026021237
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
[5] https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/
Misleading Hyperbole (Score:5, Informative)
AlphaFold 3 is being developed by Isomorphic Labs, a different Alphabet subsidiary. The fact that it is no longer being developed by DeepMind is irrelevant to both the project and the world.
IE, this story is just bogus and poorly researched. There isn't much more to say about it.
We need those computing resources (Score:2)
To make spreadsheets nobody will read and PowerPoints nobody will ever look at and code that could have been written by somebody was 6 months worth of experience...
Years ago I remember somebody talking about how they thought it was weird that they were a top class mathematician working for Google to try and trick people into clicking on ads. Like there was a hell of a lot more things this person could be doing that would be a huge benefit to human civilization and knowledge but when it came time for the
It's been superseded (Score:5, Informative)
For those wondering why, it's been superseded by other projects like [1]alpha missense and all the way into alpha genome [ieee.org]. I.E. research has moved on to other problems in the 5+ years since AlphaFold.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/alphagenome-ai-gene-regulation
I guess they were a total business failure (Score:3)
They probably did not contribute a positive return on investment for the next quarterly budget, and probably had not laid out a business plan yet how to make a profit margin at least as high as Google's advertisement and data broker business. Also, somebody noticed that robots and AI agents contain no folded proteins, so their work was of no future relevance anyway. Such disappointment!
Re: I guess they were a total business failure (Score:3)
No, no, non you don't understand. AlphaFold demonstrated serious artificial intelligence could help solve real, expensive, research problems with provable results and quantifiable value.
That is the worst thing you can do in the current environment; why would you want provable results? The moment you can prove which type of problem you can solve, everybody only asks about the 100 problems that have no line of sight to production and the 1000 problems you can only prove this cannot solve. That's how you get i
Re: (Score:2)
Scientist: "I can't get the protein to have a bigger breast or pouch."
Project Manager: "It's wrap, people!"