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.

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

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

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?"

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.

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 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.

Do Be Evil

Another one bites the dust.

How are there like 3 positive comments on this article? Is Engaget primarily for dummies?

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.

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.

Idiocracy

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

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?

Engadget changed the click bait title.

Google is not shutting down alphafold.

We pursue AI for the good of humanity my ass

Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, which is a DeepMind spin-off.

They're still actively working on this area of research.

Don't be [maximally] evil.