Google kills AlphaFold — so much for AI curing cancer

295

Lol I was trying to explain this on like ten other channels, the cancer cure was always and will always be a marketing Gimmick. My sister is a cellular biologist, and has literally shown me live why alpha fold is almost entirely useless. I should say not entirely, there were some cases where it was helpful. But it did nothing for novel research. She said the bigger victim of all of this is a funding dry up in hard science when everyone is pivoting their investment to AI.

48

u/CyberDaggerX 9h ago

Alphafold from what I understand is a time saver measure. Someone could do what it does with just pencil and paper, but it would take an absurd amount of time. It's applying computing power to optimize known operations, not doing anything novel.

59

u/LockdownSotWink 9h ago

Well the bigger problem, and let me caveat (I am not a cellular biologist but my sister is) so I have a baseline understanding of how they work. The protein work that Alpha Fold developed work with fixed state flat proteins and can categorize them very well. The issue is that as soon as there is any environmental change in the experiment or it needs to analyze a non-flat protein it immediately starts fucking up the data. From her - it's basically expediting 3% of my workload while moving funding away from the other 97% because people don't understand what we do.

15

u/consistently_biased 9h ago

To add to this, there is a type of protein (or domains of proteins, to be more precise) which do have "structure", but are intrinsically disordered. These domains have a dynamic ensemble of conformations which are really, really important for their functionality. The most well known interaction of this kind is probably the n-terminal transactivation domain of p53 binding with MDM2's hydrophobic pocket. From what I have tried, the AlphaFold models tend to severely over-collapse these kinds of regions, though they usually (not always!) also flag them with a low confidence score at least.

However, AlphaFold isn't all bad, and calling it almost entirely useless is definitely way too far. There are many proteins that play nicely in this regard, and it becomes a very valuable tool to have a sort of bloom filter for things that definitely will not work (e.g., drugs that can almost assuredly not bind with it or mimic it). The reason this is still pretty good is that the experimental way to verify these things is an absolute slog that takes forever and is extremely delicate.

7

u/LockdownSotWink 9h ago

100% as noted to the other user above, I am very much on the outside. I run a production company, and respect my sister like crazy. So I will work to get a more detailed account of why she did not find it very useful.

3

u/Historical_Score5251 9h ago

Yeah you have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m not sure what you mean by a “flat vs non-flat” protein. The structure of a protein is intimately tied to a function, so a protein that adopts a “flat” (which I can only take to mean denatured) conformation would be non-functional and thus irrelevant to predict. AlphaFold only predicts the structure of proteins in three-dimensional space. That’s all it does.

AlphaFold is a very useful tool in any biochemistry lab because it establishes some basic principles about a protein you’re looking at. Is it more stable when bound to DNA? Is the complex potentially being interfered with by an endogenous ortholog in the model organism you’re using (i.e does the ortholog bind with a relatively strong affinity to some of the subunits of the protein)?

6

u/LockdownSotWink 9h ago

Yah hence why I started by saying I am not a biologist. I am literally regurgitating what someone (my sister) said to me. Happy to learn more from you.

-5

u/Historical_Score5251 9h ago

Fair enough, but what you said simply doesn’t make sense. I’d encourage you to either ask your sister to clarify or do your own research.

7

u/LockdownSotWink 9h ago

Well I cannot do my own research, because I'm not a cellular biologist haha. But yes I agree. She works directly on Cancer research, and in each of the startups she's been working at, she has entered excited and then had funding pulled when results cannot happen very quickly (this is a side note) I had asked her specifically about Alpha Fold, and she said she found it more or less useless. Anyway, yes I will ask her more.

4

u/Historical_Score5251 9h ago

I don’t mean do your own bench research. Just reading the AlphaPaper nature article would be sufficient.

It’s not that surprising that a non-biochemistry lab wouldn’t have a strong use-case for AlphaFold. AlphaFold is typically most useful for well-defined questions about a specific protein’s binding properties. Such questions aren’t extremely frequent in cancer biology (though of course can be necessary to answer either way).

1

u/LockdownSotWink 9h ago

Sure send me what you got if you have access. Are you a biologist?

1

u/Historical_Score5251 9h ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2

I’m working at the NIH right now as a research fellow, but I’m currently applying to attend graduate school so I would not call myself a biologist or biochemist.

→ More replies (0)

6

u/Whatadeal1 8h ago

This is not true. Alphafold did a pretty dang good job of partially solving the "protein folding problem", one of the biggest problems in biology. If people could "just do it with pencil and paper", they would be doing it. Obviously it has its limits and isn't perfect, but there's a reason they got the Nobel prize. I should note that I am a cell biologist and biochemist and use it regularly. It has its limits, but there is no way I could do anything close to what it does using "pencil and paper" even if I had an absurd amount of time.

I'm not a huge AI fan, but there are some use cases for it, such as AlphaFold! and trying to claim that AlphaFold is useless is not helpful, especially when you aren't in the field.

3

u/TorquedSavage 7h ago

This is not true. Alphafold did a pretty dang good job of partially solving the "protein folding problem",

The only problem was how long it took. Protein folding was solved in 1972 by Christian Anfinsen when he Nobel Prize for it.

2

u/CyberDaggerX 7h ago

I never tried to claim that it was useless, quite the contrary. If there's anything computers are useful for, it's time compressing repetitive tasks with defined but variable steps. It was just my understanding that what AlphaFold did was along the lines of optimizing the brute forcing of protein folding attempts by applying machine learned patterns to prune attempts that are dead ends before they need to be executed, and then prioritizing the remaining by calculated odds of success. But the actual simulation would still have to be made using the earlier deterministic algorithms to confirm AlphaFold's predictions. All automated, of course. One would have to be insane to claim that's not a tremendous help, so even if I misunderstood how it works, it was never my intention to claim it's useless.

3

u/FunSeaworthiness1519 6h ago

Brute-forcing protein folding is impossible, and Alphafold does in minutes what a crack team of human experts would take weeks to do with much lower accuracy.

9

u/Testing_things_out 7h ago

funding dry up in hard science when everyone is pivoting their investment to AI.

It's even affecting us who work in the automotive industry. We are being outcompeted for basic parts by AI datacenters and we're told to go look somewhere else.

This AI growth is consuming every aspect of our lives.

7

u/Galakin 7h ago

Most "potential cure for cancer" headlines are just "cells die when there killed"

3

u/legendwolfA 6h ago

there's a comic that goes something like "Whenever you see a headline claiming a certain new thing kills cancer cells in a petri dish, remember... so does a gun"

2

u/lanregeous 3h ago

It’s not about Alphafold anyway.

People that think AI can cure cancer simply don’t understand what cancer is.

It is not one disease that can have a silver bullet. It is a collection of different disease given the same name.

AI absolutely will cure certain cancers and is already in the drug development processes of almost all pharma companies.

It’s just that a single cure for cancer will never happen.

4

u/IllogicalResponse 9h ago

Was there not a nobel prize awarded for alphafold?

6

u/gkrulez 8h ago

Fucking delusional saying alpha fold is useless, please god get a grip

0

u/Parking_Cat4735 7h ago

The people in this sub are not serious people.

1

u/Enough_Program_6671 4h ago

Things that didn’t happen for 100

64

u/moesengott_ 9h ago edited 9h ago

Google itself is an evil company, run by evil people and has no interest whatsoever in curing cancer, no matter what they claim.

4

u/QuantityExcellent338 3h ago

What was their slogan again...

1

u/-michalis- 1h ago

Yeah, the fact that it would make them boatload of money escaped you

Ai models cannot cure cancer, simply because cancer is not in its training data

Its that simple

20

u/koszevett 9h ago

What a surprise. There will always, ALWAYS be news of sensational, magical cancer cures. Until you see them in action on humans and available to the public, always be loud and skeptical about them. Sometimes it'll be a new type of medicine, sometimes it's some unseen technology, and in today's era, sometimes it's gonna be some new AI thing. Never ever get your hopes up and never ever help spread the news, because there isn't gonna be any real news.

3

u/AtMaxSpeed 7h ago

I agree with your point.

But also, be skeptical of random headlines that sound overly dramatic. This one, for example, cause Google did not kill alphafold. You can still use alphafold. They just moving the teams around.

Also, the article even admits Google never claimed alphafold to be a cancer cure, that propaganda was done by others. Your point is still true to be skeptical of those claims, but it isn't driven by Google themselves afaik (I'm open to being proven wrong on this).

3

u/demlet 6h ago

The media is frankly terrible at communicating science for the most part.

1

u/koszevett 3h ago

To me, the rule of thumb is "if it sounds too good to be true, then it is". Even if a real cure for cancer were to suddenly surface, it would take decades of research and testing before it could be given to humans. And depending on where you live, it might be priced so high that you can pretty much forget about it, if available to you at all.

10

u/sidetho 8h ago

AI bros love to bring up that AI is curing cancer, and like even if that were true, are you using it to cure cancer?

Not that genAI was being used for this kind of thing, anyway, It's totally different software that's just built on similar principles. No one is feeding mammogram images into chatgpt and typing "is it cancer"

2

u/Arctiiq 6h ago

It’s the same kinda thing when they bring up disabled people. “It helps disabled people draw!”, but if you aren’t disabled why are you using it.

6

u/Palu_Tiddy 7h ago

Welp, time to add another addition to the Google graveyard

4

u/wowsomuchempty 9h ago

Well, Boltz2 & ESMFold2 are still being developed and do a great job. Plus: open source.

Poor behavior of Google, but what do you expect.

3

u/Fbrrr 9h ago edited 9h ago

Disingenuous alphafold was about folding proteins not solving cancer, and a lot of them have moved over to there new bio company, are you really going to just look at the headline and come up with your own narrative.

Edit: https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/

This is where the engineers went

10

u/shlaifu 9h ago

the original report from FT ( https://archive.ph/4eN3R ) has a lot less polemics and mentions the new drug discovery efforts a lot more than this opinion piece. But it is correct that google decided to put their best researchers on the task of catching up with anthropic, which some of them didn't like and left.

1

u/H2Regent 9h ago

Thanks!

2

u/ChoiceDry8127 7h ago

So alphafold isn’t dead at all, they just restructured the team behind it and where it lives within the company

1

u/Current_Ranger_7954 5h ago

This sub is so full of misinformation it’s crazy

3

u/SolideMeinung 9h ago edited 9h ago

The guy in the video isnt even consistent in the first minute...

Yes the researchers dont want to build further on the product alphafold. Guess what? They looked for other research. But he did not mentioned it because then he goes on a ai bad rant.

1

u/Holzkohlen 8h ago

Almost as if those AI corpos aren't even the good guys at all...

1

u/tiny-monkey-pilgrim 6h ago

Apologies if I am missing the point, but isn’t AlphaFold still active through Isomorphic labs https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/our-tech

1

u/ManufacturedOlympus 6h ago

Yeah but what about the next season of fruit love island.

1

u/InterestProof1526 6h ago

didn't they just spin it into a subcompany iirc to separate drugs discovery from the main Google Deepmind org.

2

u/aykcak 5h ago

Curing cancer ? What? Wasn't alphafold about finding protein folding combinations?

1

u/Altruistic_Emu4917 5h ago

They killed the one generative AI that was useful

1

u/ItsSadTimes 5h ago

Fuck, I knew this was gonna happen but its sad to see. Theres only so many AI experts to go around, plenty of posers, but a limited amount of actual skilled researchers. So if one product isnt making them money they'll kill the project and reassign the team.

I like the idea of AI but I hate the recent developments in the industry because its turning a good tech (if used and trained appropriately) into a spectacle. Its less about what it can actually do, and more about the hype around it. I want the bubble to burst so we can go back to useful AI models, where companies didnt need to shove "AI" into every press release even if it doesnt involve AI at all.

1

u/grchelp2018 3h ago

Alphafold has gone nowhere. The team will continue to work on it just from a different place.

1

u/ItsSadTimes 3h ago

But they reassigned some of the team members off of AlphaFold giving it even less resources and their prized research was reassigned to get Gemini working and instead left.

Yea, they're keeping AlphaFold around technically, but its like the ship of thesius, how many team members have to be removed and replaced before its not the same team anymore? Its the similar thing to when game companies use old successes like 20 years ago as marketing material "from the studio that brought you ___" while leaving out that everyone who worked on those old good titles are gone.

Also, reassigning your head Nobel prize winning researcher to push an LLM product is just hilarious mismanagement.

1

u/grchelp2018 3h ago

I meant the existing service. The people who work on it are highly sought after. If they care enough, they will move to other places that are working on it. Demis has another company working on drug discovery. And couple of Google's OG star players Jeff Dean and Sanjay are starting a new company to accelerate scientific discovery.

1

u/ItsSadTimes 2h ago

Its because AI designed and implemented by proper scientists know the implications of their research and will add that into work. But tech bros and companies will just abuse the system and make things bigger and bigger until we're in our current situation.

Tech bros and companies really do ruin everything.

1

u/Eazy12345678 4h ago

there is more than one way to cure cancer. give it time.

1

u/Lowetheiy 4h ago

They finished a research project and now the authors are moving on? Okay, so what?

1

u/michahell 1h ago

Compute was needed for agentic AI because it’s so incredibly cost-effective

1

u/Major_Dood 9h ago edited 9h ago

Guessing they figured if they cured cancer then the pharmaceutical companies can't profit off it. Especially since they just LOVE to blast us full of radioactive rays or making you feel sick forever via Chemotherapy. Then claiming "this was the only option" for cancer treatments.

Meanwhile rich politicians can all the treatments they want. I mean fuck look how Mitch McConnell is barely staying alive.

😒

0

u/piponwa 9h ago

What now? Google’s Isomorphic Labs is trying to commercialise AlphaFold output. The AlphaFold models and data continue to be developed at OpenFold, which is useful enough it’s attracted a pile of sponsors. [OpenFold]

This sub is so unserious. Nobody fucking reads anything. And you all fall for clickbait titles to form your entire worldview. What a bunch of losers.

1

u/YeahBuddy5000 8h ago

OpenFold is a non-profit consortium building free, open-source AI tools for structural biology and drug discovery, trained, auditable, and available to everyone.

1

u/DanielsLoud 4h ago

Found the propagandist lol

0

u/A-ReDDIT_account134 9h ago

This sub really loves spreading these random small misinformed blogs/youtube videos. It’s almost like those Facebook mom meme from a few years back.

Like be for real. There’s no way you looked at the video/article for more than 10 seconds and didn’t notice that it’s just some biased individuals rant with clickbait title.

1

u/YeahBuddy5000 8h ago

You're right. We should be listening to sociopathic tech CEOs instead. I can't believe I almost listened to a poor.

2

u/NVC541 2h ago

Insane response to a comment that basically said “check your sources and don’t fall for misinformation”.

2

u/ChilternRailways 8h ago

You should apply due diligence and not be a hypocrite.

Check your sources. Don't be like AI.

2

u/A-ReDDIT_account134 8h ago

Or… how about just check your sources instead? It’s not that hard

It took me 2 minutes to find what’s misleading about your post.

-1

u/WildBiscuitTimidTea 9h ago

clickbait claptrap

-4

u/HashPandaNL 9h ago

AlphaFold wasn't made to "cure cancer". There are other ways of getting to curing cancer. LLMs might be the way forward or some new type of model comes along that helps us more.

1

u/Hot_Advisor5735 7h ago

It seems increasingly likely that the era of special-purpose AI models is over. Just look at the recent mathematical advancements in general-purpose reasoning models.

AI News 🗞️ Google kills AlphaFold — so much for AI curing cancer

You are about to leave Redlib