[zaroth]

To expand on this, after fully reading AlQuraishi's "What Just Happened" post from a couple years ago, was this point that he made;

> I don’t think we would do ourselves a service by not recognizing that what just happened presents a serious indictment of academic science. There are dozens of academic groups, with researchers likely numbering in the (low) hundreds, working on protein structure prediction. We have been working on this problem for decades, with vast expertise built up on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, and not insignificant computational resources when measured collectively. For DeepMind’s group of ~10 researchers, with primarily (but certainly not exclusively) ML expertise, to so thoroughly route everyone surely demonstrates the structural inefficiency of academic science. This is not Go, which had a handful of researchers working on the problem, and which had no direct applications beyond the core problem itself. Protein folding is a central problem of biochemistry, with profound implications for the biological and chemical sciences. How can a problem of such vital importance be so badly neglected?

In short, academia got utterly schooled by a small group at Google spending a relatively small dollar amount on compute, using techniques that in hindsight are fairly described as "simplistic". There's no way around it.

[Invictus0]

I don't think AlQuraishi really hits the mark in his critique. The mere fact that hundreds or thousands of people working on a problem for decades doesn't account for the fact that the field of machine learning has been growing extremely rapidly over the last decade, the compute power available has grown exponentially, and the people working on the problem simply weren't looking at the problem in the way that the deepmind people were looking at it.

If you were trying to get across the Atlantic, this would be like getting upset at a group of bridgebuilders for trying to solve the problem by building a bridge across instead of by inventing the airplane. The approaches are that different.

[flobosg]

> and the people working on the problem simply weren't looking at the problem in the way that the deepmind people were looking at it.

>The approaches are that different.

I'm not sure if that analogy applies here. DeepMind wasn't the first group tackling structure prediction with machine learning. Their success lies in the innovations that they implemented (predicting interresidue distances as opposed to contacts, for example).

[dash2]

To be fair, I'm not sure that they are "simplistic" in the sense that, e.g., writing a neural network to recognise cat pictures is now simplistic. I don't know how many people have Deepmind levels of expertise in ML, or could implement what they have done, but I doubt it is many, and they are thinly spread amongst many interesting problems.