It’s not hard to see why, with the emergence (ha) of OpenAI, Midjourney and all of this generative modelling, what has DeepMind done? I imagine the execs at Google are asking them some very probing questions on their mediocre performance over the last 5 years.
Deep minds work on Density functional theory was complete rubbish, and everyone in computational chemistry knows it. They simply modelled static geometry and overfit their data, we wanted this methodology to work, computing DFT is expensive, and we did multiple months of rigorous work and the reality of the situation is that a bunch of machine learning engineers with a glancing amount of chemistry knowledge, made approximations that were way too naive, and announced it as a huge success in their typical fashion.
What they then count on is people not having enough knowledge of DFT / Quantum property prediction to query their work and make claims like “it certainly does move academia way further ahead” - which is total rubbish. In what way? Why aren’t these models being used in ab initio simulators now? The answer to that is simple: they are not revolutionary, in fact they are not even useful.