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GeorgeJIrwin

When will we see the result of this breakthrough in our daily life?

The article mentions:

> So far, the data have been harnessed to tackle problems ranging from antibiotic resistance to crop resilience.

Is any of them is about to be used in our daily life and solve a major problem?

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Denis Hassabis has talked about the next evolution of AlphaFold to be developed (and what the team is working on): predicting interactions between proteins. If they are successful (which I really hope they will be as a person with both chronic illness and relatives and friends with illnesses), I can’t think of any drug research where it won’t accerelate the drug development.

Except the article is wrong. "Tackle" is doing a lot of work...it doesn't actually mean anything in this case, as AlphaFold has not been shown to help in antibiotic resistance (compounds found using it haven't even been tested in the real world), and has not increased crop resilience in any independent peer reviewed studies or in the real world. It's all still hype at this point.

“It’s all still hype at this point” implies this is vaporware when it’s a real thing that has solved one of the biggest roadblocks in microbiology. Your claim is analogous to lithium batteries, invented in 1976, taking 25+ years before completely DOMINATING the modern battery market. Science takes time to go from the research stage to mass market adoption. Level set your expectations.

You picked a convenient analogy. No one knew whether lithium batteries were going to be as useful as they were. Much additional testing and work was necessary to prove it. It COULD have failed. Same with Alpha Fold. Abandon your expectations.

Survivorship bias. There are 100x more tools and ideas that never got adopted, you just haven't heard of them.

But AlphaFold is already being used in a ton of research labs at great effect.

Most of this is probably just marketing/partnerships. It's way too early to tell. The only way to tell whether Alphafold is truly a breakthrough is to wait and see if it passes the test of time.

It is being "used", yes, but to "great effect"? We don't see any "effects" yet - that's the whole point - we don't know yet whether the hype is justified. Time will tell.

My wife used it in her neuroscience research to see which protein would go through certain tissue barriers (or that's what I understood). It doesn't have the ability to predict interaction with cells and other proteins, and it's not 100%, but it's still useful.

How do you know it's not being useful in research already? Biology is a slow field, you won't see papers mentioning it for months if not years. If I know one person team that uses it, there must be plenty.

Sure...we don't know things that haven't happened yet. When a biology paper is published that leads to actual advantages for real life patients or for new technologies to be built that actually solve real world problems, then the hype will begin to be justified. Being "used in research" is not justification for hype. Adding lines to researchers' CVs doesn't actually improve the human condition in any way.

Well it has been useful for scientists so far, and it's a super early technology. The hype helps researchers know about it, and it will undoubtedly be in papers soon since it's being used today.

More resilient crops and reliable antibiotics is "daily life" and "major problem".

Logic compels us to conclude that we will see some results of this on our daily lives and it will become the solution to some "problems".

Problem is, our major problems are mostly social. Biologists will sell you the story that this is a breakthrough that will empower us to improve crop yield and solve world hunger. But we all know we could already have solved it. Turns out the US rather spend billions to build another aircraft carrier instead of develop Africa's farm machinery industry. It is sad. But it is the world.

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