[rademacher]

The author does make a point of discussing the question of what business does a team like DeepMind have researching the folding problem? The solution is of no apparent value to the parent company Alphabet, and yet they were still funded. Perhaps this has to do with the attitudes or values of "modern" tech companies? Historically, there seems to have been a cyclically nature to the volume of basic research in industry, peaking with Bell Labs, sinking with the rise of Welch, and now coming back with the Googs and Facebooks.

[joe_the_user]

Well, one could put it cynically as Deep has developed a giant "cannon" that can be fired at different very hard but reasonably well defined problems. They've hit go, chess and similar things. Hitting proteins keeps their activity in the limelight. Essentially, DeepMind is demonstrating the value of the money Google paid to purchase it.

Cowsandmilks points out the limit of AlphaProtein above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18647187

The problem is one runs out of reasonably isolated problems with a reasonable metric.

[mentat]

You seem to be implying that the world would be better if they didn't do this research, that doing it as a tech company to just apply the tech is immoral. Is that what you really mean?