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  • Can anyone with a Times sub please cutnpaste the text of that ^ ?

  • That article, although it's not the only one.

    The British artificial intelligence pioneer, 44, revealed an AI system that had solved one of biology’s great challenges — how to predict rapidly the 3D structures of proteins, an advance that promises to open a new era of discovery and drug development.

    No, it bloody well hasn't solved that problem and no respectable science correspondent (sadly, most are not respectable) should take that claim at face value. Sadly, both the Times and the Guardian blindly accept DeepMind's shameless hype of (checks notes) their own commercial product.

    AlphaFold is a significant advance, but it hasn't solved the problem. It isn't hard to find informed experts in the field who give a more measured assessment. Try this, for example. That one is particularly good because it not only salutes the scale of the advance but also goes into detail about why anybody should be suspicious of DeepMind's claims given their commercial interests, the obstacles to reproducing their methods and their actual behaviour (e.g. all the patents they've now applied for).

    Sometimes bad reporting of science is entirely down to the naivety of poorly-educated reporters, sometimes self-interested distortion by the researchers (or their employers), sometimes both. In this case, it's both. Hassabis absolutely knows the definition of "decidable" in computing/logic, so he knows he's telling porkies when he says the problem is solved. It isn't even solved for most practical purposes (nowhere near), let alone definitively.

    You have previous on here for getting a hard-on for AI without actually understanding it. Don't be surprised when this irritates people who have some knowledge either of the computing AI field or the specific area where the AI/ML you're uncritically hyping is being applied. It's not because they're Luddites, it's because they care.

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