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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

>“It really demanded modern AI to formulate the three-dimensional structure very precisely to make this discovery.”

It's not like bic pens. It's a new technique they couldn't do before that helped crack the mystery.

Also the title is "AI Helps..." not "AI Discovers" so that's kind of a strawman. I don't think anyone is denying the humans did great work. Maybe it's more like Joe Boggs uses the Hubble telescope to find a new galaxy and moaning because the telescope gets a mention.

I'm quite enthusiastic about the AI bit. My grandad died with alzheimer's 50 years ago. My sister is due to die of als in a couple of years. Both areas have been kind of stuck for decades. I'm hoping the AI modeling allows some breakthroughs.

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I think my problem is that this is maybe the most minimal and mundane use of AlphaFold, but it is treated like one of the main points of the paper. The small molecules they tested were already known to inhibit this enzyme, the structural modeling done based on AlphaFold is a minute part of the story compared to the dozens of incredibly difficult experiments they did - it almost seems the sort of thing one of the reviewers suggested during the initial submission and was added after the first round of edits.

I can't tell you how many times I've sat through talks where someone (usually ill-equipped to really engage with the research) suggests that the speaker tries AlphaFold for this or that without a clear understanding of what sort of biological insight they're expecting. It's also a joke at this point how often grad students plug their protein into AlphaFold and spend several minutes giving a half-baked analysis of the result. There are absolutely places where structure prediction is revolutionizing things including drug discovery, but can we acknowledge the hype when we see it?

I'm very sorry for your loss, my aunt is also declining due to this disease. I think statistically everyone either goes through it or becomes a caretaker if they live long enough.

>statistically everyone either goes through it or becomes a caretaker

May be what happens but it’s not required or what people want. A massive amount of those diagnosed, more than half, would prefer a compassionate end to their life at the right time. Less than 2% are able to end up taking this option.

> Maybe it's more like Joe Boggs uses the Hubble telescope to find a new galaxy and moaning because the telescope gets a mention.

Maybe I've underestimated the impact the AI tooling has had then, because seems to me that your example wouldn't be an issue as it's literally the entire tool to discover.

> I'm hoping the AI modeling allows some breakthroughs.

I'm actually on board with you on this, I think it can be extrememly useful and really speed things up when dealing with such huge amount of complex data that needs to be worked with, my only gripe here was the title itself. It's seems forced when it could have been "Amazing breakthrough discovered to unravel cause of Alzheimer’s" - From here the main body of the article would match the title, with a nice shout out to a really creative use of AI.

Maybe more like “Excavator helps archaeologists discover new species”?

Sure, when the excavator was new and could help do larger scale archeological excavations that were never possible before, then why not title it like that?

I was thinking maybe like Van Leeuwenhoek uses glass gizmo to discover first microorganism. In that AI molecular simulation is a new tech which will probably get better and help many discoveries.

OK, then "New mega-sized excavator allows archeologist to process more material than before"?

Computer-assisted genomics leads scientists to discover...

  > It's a new technique they couldn't do before that helped crack the mystery.

What about SAT-based solvers [1] for same problem?

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5361301

Would that technique do the same? If not, why?

>I don't think anyone is denying the humans did great work

The title cites the AI contribution, not the human

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