Show HN: Generative AI – Short and Sweet
generativeai.net
generativeai.net
### Begin Generative AI - Short & Sweet 08 “We (humans) are very bad judges of the impossible.” - DeepMind. The GAI topic of the week is .. AlphaFold by Google DeepMind (GDM). A model that accurately generates complex 3-dimensional protein structures with correct folding from a 1-dimensional string input only. The impact this model has on research & development in all kinds of areas is unparalleled.
For visual learners, these are AlphaFold’s results of generated proteins measured against experimental results: highly accurate.
Remarkable milestones Leading to GDM’s AlphaFold and its wide success, there are a couple of milestones worth mentioning. Disclaimer: there are many more important events that happened, but I try to stick to the newsletter’s title, which I am already bad at.
1996 - Deep Blue by IBM literally a tower computer won against Garri Kasparov the long-time world champion in chess [1]. Number of possible moves in chess: 10^120 (a one with 120 zeros) aka the Shannon number.
2016 - AlphaGo by GDM won in a series of Go matches against the former world champion Lee Sedol. Go is a complex Chinese board game with a 19x19 grid [2]. Number of possible moves in Go: 10^172 and, comparatively if not heard yet, there are 10^82 atoms in the universe.
2019 - AlphaStar by GDM reached the grandmaster status in StarCraft II. StarCraft II is one of the most challenging real-time strategy games. It has an unlimited number of moves [3].
2020 - AlphaFold 2 by GDM scored above 90 for proteins in CASP's global distance test, the Olympics of protein folding. This is a test that measures the degree to which a predicted structure is similar to the determined structure in lab experiments, with 100 being a complete match. With a score of 90, this problem is considered solved [4]. With this result, AlphaFold is around 3 times better than previous solutions.
The last one is especially interesting because everything in a prediction of protein folding has to be exactly right. Nature is much less forgiving than a game where perhaps not every move has to be executed perfectly.
AlphaFold’s gift to humanity Usually, it goes like this: a company solves a problem and - rightfully so - monetizes it. The harder the problem solved, the higher the price. Especially, when there is demand. .... Continue on newsletter page.