Science Memes

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Nobel Prize 2024 (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

it’s not even impressive enough to make a positive world impact in the 2-3 years it’s been publicly available.

It literally just won people two Nobel prizes

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

How does that help the rest of us?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

It allows us to predict the structure of proteins before we make them. This can speed up research into protein-based medical treatments by astronomical amounts-- drugs which took years to develop through trial and error and/or thousands of hours of computational power can now be predicted beforehand in terms of their structure, which allows us to predict how they interact woth the proteins in our body. It's an incredible breakthrough in the speed of medical research.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 weeks ago

It's hype like this that breaks the back of the public when "AI doesn't change anything". Don't get me wrong: AlphaFold has done incredible things. We can now create computational models of proteins in a few hours instead of a decade. But the difference between a computational model and the actual thing is like the difference between a piece of cheese and yellow plastic: they both melt nicely but you'd never want one of them in your quesadilla.

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