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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone describe how/where this actually fits into Meta's businesses?

"As a test case, they decided to wield their model on a database of bulk-sequenced ‘metagenomic’ DNA from environmental sources including soil, seawater, the human gut, skin and other microbial habitats."

Meta has a lot of data, but I'm unaware of them having a presence in the environmental/medical diagnostics industry which is where I assume this would be applied

Perhaps they are going for a Bell Labs kind of structure?

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Probably the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative https://chanzuckerberg.com/

They have a stated goal of eradication all diseases by 2100

This is a completely separate business from Meta.

About as separate as Tesla is from Twitter.

Meta has been one of the powerhouses of AI research for many years now.

Why? Recruiting most likely.

Improving the newsfeed algorithm. Automating content moderation. Creating content for the upcoming Metaverse. Realistic virtual characters for the Metaverse.

Whether or not we like, or agree with, or believe in their goals (I don't), I think it's hard to argue that competence in AI is not useful for them.

Yes, however all of that research was directly applicable to the Meta family of companies products - most specifically around NLP, image processing and computer vision with some work in RL. So it was applicable to the company, in addition to being good for recruiting.

Unclear what products this would apply to

It gives them cred, cred in turn makes it easier to hire smart people in this field which has overlap with things that are actually meta's business.

* stifled laughter *

Genuinely sorry.

It sounds like a joke, but despite public opinion, Meta is one of the top AI research groups in the world.

To keep Zuckerberg AI up-to-date most likely

> Can anyone describe how/where this actually fits into Meta's businesses?

AI can predict the behavior of the users, feeding them as many relevant ads as possible, while keeping them engaged.

I think they were asking with regards to why does Meta cares about Protein structure. It doesn't care but it does help them keep up with the state of the art in ML I suppose.

How could they not

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