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by aardvarkr 1360 days ago
“It’s all still hype at this point” implies this is vaporware when it’s a real thing that has solved one of the biggest roadblocks in microbiology. Your claim is analogous to lithium batteries, invented in 1976, taking 25+ years before completely DOMINATING the modern battery market. Science takes time to go from the research stage to mass market adoption. Level set your expectations.
2 comments
mudrockbestgirl 1359 days ago
Survivorship bias. There are 100x more tools and ideas that never got adopted, you just haven't heard of them.
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m00x 1359 days ago
But AlphaFold is already being used in a ton of research labs at great effect.
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TaupeRanger 1359 days ago
It is being "used", yes, but to "great effect"? We don't see any "effects" yet - that's the whole point - we don't know yet whether the hype is justified. Time will tell.
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m00x 1359 days ago
My wife used it in her neuroscience research to see which protein would go through certain tissue barriers (or that's what I understood). It doesn't have the ability to predict interaction with cells and other proteins, and it's not 100%, but it's still useful.

How do you know it's not being useful in research already? Biology is a slow field, you won't see papers mentioning it for months if not years. If I know one person team that uses it, there must be plenty.

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TaupeRanger 1359 days ago
Sure...we don't know things that haven't happened yet. When a biology paper is published that leads to actual advantages for real life patients or for new technologies to be built that actually solve real world problems, then the hype will begin to be justified. Being "used in research" is not justification for hype. Adding lines to researchers' CVs doesn't actually improve the human condition in any way.
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m00x 1358 days ago
Well it has been useful for scientists so far, and it's a super early technology. The hype helps researchers know about it, and it will undoubtedly be in papers soon since it's being used today.
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mudrockbestgirl 1359 days ago
Most of this is probably just marketing/partnerships. It's way too early to tell. The only way to tell whether Alphafold is truly a breakthrough is to wait and see if it passes the test of time.
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TaupeRanger 1359 days ago
You picked a convenient analogy. No one knew whether lithium batteries were going to be as useful as they were. Much additional testing and work was necessary to prove it. It COULD have failed. Same with Alpha Fold. Abandon your expectations.
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