Google DeepMind dismantles AlphaFold team(www.ft.com)
35 pointsby ainch4 hours ago4 comments
  • adverbly2 hours ago
    Painful to see teams doing great work getting pulled away on the premise that there is "even greater work" to be done in other areas.

    There was something magical about the old days of Bell labs where there was just a naturally occurring and self-organizing list of all-star scientists who were in control over their area of research.

    Too much money and power pushing and directing these individuals.

    The clock is on and the magic is gone.

    • ainch2 hours ago
      John Jumper moving to work on LLM coding capabilities does seem quite shortsighted - and little surprise perhaps that he then quit to work on AI for science again at Anthropic.
    • jackb40402 hours ago
      The "greater work" is scanning then burning millions of books btw
      • satvikpendeman hour ago
        Don't confuse Google and Anthropic. Google already has a huge corpus of books via Google Books, none of which they burned after since they were borrowed books. The recent Anthropic settlement does not require them to burn books at all, they just can't keep them indefinitely whether physically or virtually. Nothing stops them from donating the books again.
        • impossibleforkan hour ago
          Yes, but surely the problem isn't the the law requires anything in particular, but rather that a bunch of books are getting bought by an organization that is likely to systematically destroy them and that there among those books are a niche books or unusual books that would end up disappearing, and thus that cultural artifacts and knowledge might be disappearing due to this.
        • sirwhinesalotan hour ago
          Anthropic destroyed the books, they can't donate them again.
          • satvikpendeman hour ago
            Yes, the law does not require them to destroy the books is my point.
      • philipkglassan hour ago
        Google was scanning millions of books before the LLM craze, and they didn't burn them. They partnered with libraries and built their own non-destructive scanning hardware. I'm guessing this comment is really about Anthropic, but they are distinct companies.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Scanning_of_books

  • hmokiguess2 hours ago
    Weird times, next up they'll all end up named "Member of the Technical Staff" and working on "Classified"
  • plt31202 hours ago
    So many words for "we don't know what to do and want ROI now". Truly SoTA spinning.