AI: Forget ChatGPT, AlphaFold Is The Gold Standard
Merely 17% of the roughly 20,000 proteins in the human body had their 3-D structures known prior to AlphaFold. Enter AlphaFold and now 3-D structures for nearly the entire (98.5%) human proteome. This is a giant leap considering drug discovery is now easier.
I've been often accused of being a "Google-phile", someone that is somehow emotionally attached to a US-based multinational software company, this always makes me laugh. I am astounded not by organisations but by products I can use to make my life easier. Products are of course not created in a vacuum and the ethics and morals of the creators are always uppermost in my mind.
DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014 and is now part of the wider Alphabet group. It's research into AI with it's wider goal of creating/discovering General AI, has of course been fed up/across to the Google product factory, notably the speech generation when you talk to the Google Assistant, or Android's Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness features amongst others*
It's always been an incredible when DeepMind exhibits it's latest output, from the beginning of how they had machines learn (by physically watching screens) how to play games, all the way up to AlphaGo and it's winning matches.
And then, AlphaFold was released, or more correctly the results of AlphaFold. Not just released in a, "Look at what we can do", but all folds generated then and in the future, released for free to all everyone.
In July 2021, a London-based subsidiary of Alphabet, DeepMind, delivered the revolutionary answer to the decades-long ‘protein-folding problem’ in the history of AI research: AlphaFold. The open-source AlphaFold can accurately predict 3D models of protein structures from 1D amino acid sequences, which is accelerating scientific research in every field of biology and life science.
Do I understand much of all of this, no. I know nothing of proteins, folding, and even how it benefits humankind ... but I do know it does and will do.
ChatGPT is a toy whereas AlphaFold is a genuine positive to us all.
Solve the actual big problems.
* DeepMind researchers have applied machine learning models to the sport of football, often referred to as soccer in North America, to modelling the behaviour of football players, including the goalkeeper, defenders, and strikers during different scenarios such as penalty kicks. The researchers used heat maps and cluster analysis to organize players based on their tendency to behave a certain way during the game when confronted with a decision on how to score or prevent the other team from scoring.
[more: Wikipedia: DeepMind - Sports]
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