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Earlier this week, Google-owned artificial intelligence development company DeepMind announced with great fanfare that it had built an algorithm that could predict how proteins would fold based on their molecular composition.
If it holds up, it’s an extraordinary achievement that has eluded scientists for decades. But Business Insider reports that many experts in the field are unimpressed, calling DeepMind’s ad hype instead.
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While critical scientists do not discount the importance of DeepMind’s findings, they wonder if AlphaFold 2 will actually provide a useful tool to researchers as DeepMind claims.
DeepMinds’ AlphaFold 2 algorithm scored higher in the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition, which tests potential solutions to the protein folding problem, than any other team in history.
It could be a weakness. Field Scientists, WITH A reports, suggest that AlphaFold 2 was optimized specifically for CASP as if it were earning the highest score in a video game.
“We can’t really be sure how well AlphaFold will work in the face of the much richer and more varied range of proteins found in the real world of living organisms,” said University of Birmingham computer scientist Max Little. WITH A.
Frankly, the hype is of no use to anyone. DeepMind can now never live up to the promise that was made and dragged experimenters through the mud in the process. Also, as long as DeepMind doesn’t share their code, nobody in the field cares and it’s only they who pat themselves on the back.
– Mike Thompson (@mctucsf) December 1, 2020
First step
However, CASP President John Moult defended DeepMind’s work and dismissed the notion that the competition does not produce real-world use.
“CASP is not a game, it is a scientific experiment designed to test folding methods in real life situations,” said Moult WITH A. “What is missing?”
“Fifty years of hearing false claims about this issue have made me the most skeptical in the world,” Moult added. “But I’ve been looking at these results very carefully … Clearly, this is just the beginning of what DeepMind and others will achieve with these kinds of approaches.”
READ MORE: DeepMind’s protein folding breakthrough triggers heated debate among skeptical scientists: “As long as they don’t share their code, nobody in the field cares.” [Business Insider]
More on AlphaFold: Google solves a long-standing and near-impossible biology problem
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