Post #4214264

2026-07-29 20:42 UTC

Google shut down the AlphaFold team, trying to reassign the people behind the super interesting problem of using ML to predict protein structure from sequence onto chatbot development. A whole bunch left the company. www.engadget.com/…/google-shuts-down-alphafold/ The Business Idiots are truly running the asylum.

Replies (2)

@samvines@awful.systems 2026-07-29 21:46

Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on… Come on guys it’s still architecture. Where are you going?

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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-07-30 02:16

One of the defenses I see of LLMs on place like /r/singularity (although recently /r/singularity has started wising up and the committed true believers have shifted to /r/accelerate), is that they are going to cure cancer or some other incredibly valuable thing, conflating AI, ML in general, DNN, vs. LLMs specifically. Technology like AlphaFold was a lot more on the “cure cancer” track (although there is still a huge gap between better protein folding predictions and successful drug discovery) than anything LLM related… this is sad.

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