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Google shuts down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project as it focuses on Gemini
(www.engadget.com)
delusional dimwits dreaming dollar signs
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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~~Don't~~ be [maximally] evil.
Google: A little evil is okay.
Very evil is fine too for them
So instead of continuing a project that could cure diseases and help understand human biology they'll focus on a system I use for asking questions like "What adhesive is best to attaching siding trim?"
At this point in time ai is just a data gathering tool
Exactly. No offense to the average liberal but this whole "but what will happen to all the compute and data centers when the AI bubble bursts" is so tiring.
Firstly, the fascist regime will absolutely bail out a few key companies. Secondly, all those centers will be used for mass surveillance, war games, predictive policing (and population control), and all the other shit in the fascist grabbag.
There is absolutely a level of speculation to this insane bubble. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to ignore the evidence of your eyes. Obviously there is an aspect of short sighted money chasing (pretty standard capitalist bs), and there is absolutely an aspect of corporate greed and the companies trying to outbuild, outcompute one another. But for the people at the top (Miller, Thiel, Elston, Musk maybe, and others), they absolutely have long term goals. They are definitely getting rich off the bubble and benefiting from the short term insanity, but there is more there.
These neofeudalist assholes want to see us in chains, under their ever watchful AI eyes.
Mass surveillance, is of questionable value beyond just creating a database of footage. Police DON'T aim to "solve all crime and be good guys". They barely aim for investigating all crimes, and most crime they'd just need a time and date for to look at the footage only IF and WHEN a crime is reported. They're not going to spend police resources to have cops sift through footage the AI has guessed there's crime in every day. That would just cost time/money. At best it might be used for facial recognition at protests - but facial recognition systems predate AI, so it's superfluous.
war games, takes appropriate training data which is increadibly difficult to simulate and get the right answers from. There are already various war-gaming departments who have been trying to do this. The YouTube channel People Make Games has an episode on this - war just has so many variables that beyond the basics of troops numbers and geography it's kind of difficult. But even if this becomes a use, it's niche, it wouldn't require a large amount of compute, each country only has one military... And spending on research projects (eg. DARPA) isn't new. It's not enough to be a "big win" for 3 AI giants, it's more a step back to where they came from.
predictive policing (and population control) hang on, wasn't this your first example? Again, mis-matches and police time checking the AI are going to cost too much, and those programs would cost big money in lawsuits and time. It'd be the first program cut by most departments.
I see nothing realistic here.
More likely uses are jobs that burn through a lot of copy writers: spam/marketing, realestate ads, search engines and researching, little buddies and toys, publishing (sadly), video games, weather bureaus, text transcription and translation, scams and telemarketing. Things there's lots of data on, and close to zero risk with.
You're assuming that the police will actually sift through footage in a meaningful way instead of just trusting faulty, fascist trained ai algorithms. Like that one guy who got mistaken by an AI profiling systen at a casino for someone who was kicked out, and when handed his license to prove he was a different person, the cops LITERALLY just refused to believe the evidence of their eyes. They took him to jail because the almighty machine could never be wrong. The story is wild: https://thecivilrightslawyer.com/2026/03/11/ai-software-tells-cops-to-arrest-the-wrong-guy/.
An elderly lady misidentified by Flock, held for 6 months in jail: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-grandmother-jail-mistake
I'm sorry that apparently this fascist threat isn't enough for you to think it's a big deal, but it is.
Your examples are about AIs costing police departments money, which is what I'm saying. I'm saying it won't be a viable use long term, BECAUSE of the blow back in time, lawsuits, and money.
As I said earlier; "Again, mis-matches and police time checking the AI are going to cost too much, and those programs would cost big money in lawsuits and time. It'd be the first program cut by most departments."
More likely uses are jobs that burn through a lot of copy writers: spam/marketing, realestate ads, search engines and researching, little buddies and toys, publishing (sadly), video games, weather bureaus, text transcription and translation, scams and telemarketing. Things there's lots of data on, and close to zero risk with.
What about the billions ICE is spending on stockpiling weapons and vehicles, the increased military budget, rhe continued erosion of our rights, and the almost certainly rigged upcoming midterms suggests lawsuits and courts are going to be any impediment to the fascists eventually?
And no, I'm not saying we just roll over and give up. But I am being realistic with the way that most authoritarian regimes go, and how they consolidate all power. Trump campaigned on giving politice as much immunity as he could, and that includes the way that courts punish police oversight and brutality. He's actually delivered quite well on the things that benefit him and his cronies. And since police serve as the Pinkerton class of capital, I think once he gets enough power, he will fulfill that promise.
Give DHS as much immunity as they need, CiA and FBI clearance and permissions up the wazoo, and anything else they need to stay in power.
If they don't care about lawsuits, then why would they need an AI to tell them who to arrest? They'll just arrest whoever they want.
I think they'll just be used to force VDI on consumers.
Which is a shame, because VDI could be amazing for consumers, but it won't be.
"Finish nailer will get it through warranty and then it's not our problem."
- Home builders
Well, you see, there are dozens of adhesive manufacturers willing to pay for advertising or top indexing, while any medical research that could incidentally mention gender or race has its funding set on fire by the US government.
Engadget changed the click bait title.
Google is not shutting down alphafold.
New title: Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team
Although the url slug still says:
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/
There is no story here, the original Alphafold team was moving to the private pharma service version of Alphafold. alpha fold continues, nothing is shut down.
Engadget should stick to iphone reviews.
It’s kind of a marvel that we all have the bulk of human knowledge at our fingertips, and instead of noble pursuits we largely use it for social manipulation and power grabs.
I guess there is just more population control in misinformation than there is in curing disease.
The radio was originally imagined to be a public education and cultural broadcast system. Instead it broadcast Amos and Andy.
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Funny, one of the first arguments I had about AI was with someone who insisted it would be incredibly helpful at predicting protein folds.
That person was right: https://medicine.iu.edu/blogs/research-updates/the-protein-folding-problem-the-day-ai-unlocked-a-secret-of-life
So this may be why Google is closing AlphaFold; AI is already doing it.
So this may be why Google is closing AlphaFold; AI is already doing it.
If you have no idea what Alphafold is, why comment on it. Fucking Lemmy....
To be clear, I wasn't necessarily disagreeing about AI's utility, just about how protein fold AI isn't the same as LLM AI; we've used computer models for predictions of protein structure and genetic mutation severity for a while, though they have always been taken with a grain of salt that I fear is no longer being done - a prediction is still a prediction, after all. Doctors were already incorrectly confusing computer model predictions of genetic mutation severity for positive test results back when I was working as a genetic counselor in the 2010's - my concern is that the widespread trust of "AI" is only going to exacerbate that.
I'm a bit confused, though. The AI doing it was AlphaFold, which is shutting down. Shouldn't your statement be AI was already doing it? Gemini is an LLM - not the same type of thing as AlphaFold, despite the fact that they're both called "AI," which was the cause of my original argument. The AI that was doing the protein fold prediction is being replaced with an "AI" that can't. It looks like there's still RoseTTAFold, but losing the frontrunner is still not great when it's shutting down to focus more on LLM's.
It's a actually fairly similar to LLMs architecturally. Tokens go in, pretrained transformers do black box magic, tokens come out.
Advancements in one may very well carry over to the other so maybe there'll be an alphafold 4 one day but for now universities have access to 3 and can run it if they have the compute.
The article also talks about a spinoff of AlphaFold…..
I didn’t click into what that spinoff was but maybe an even better headline is “for profit company creates a free AI to predict protein folding and is moving to monetize it”
Higher versions of Alphafold will be a service for biotech an pharma to buy.
AlphaFold is Google’s AI approach to protein folding…
So they want the chat bot that lies instead of the science machine that cures cancers.
Wouldn't expect any less from the company that removed "Dont be evil" from its company charter.
A tragedy has befallen humanity.
So the actually useful product gets shit down for the useless product
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Jumper announced in June that he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic.
Key people were leaving.
Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, which is a DeepMind spin-off.
It's not as bad as the headline makes it sound.
amazing work
it's crazy. some of this went from taking years to now taking minutes and people react negative because it's using machine learning and AI.
Thank you Google.
This is fundamentally different than chat bots and the anti-AI movement needs to learn this to be effective.
The model itself is structurally very similar to LLMs. It's just that the tokens aren't words.
don't blame the anti-AI movement for conflating when it was places like Google that purposely marketed LLMs as AI.
ofc people will confuse the two and just say "fuck all AI".
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So I finally let my Android Auto update from Google Assistant to Gemini, which it's been wanting for months.
First thing I did was prompt it to play a specific artist, just like I do at least once a week since it forces me to use the voice activation instead of the on screen keyboard, even when there are passengers that can type. It responded saying it is not capable of playing music at all. Wtf.
So I then rephrase and tell it to play the artist on YouTube Music... And it does so, but doesn't get the artist even close to correct. I had to prompt it 5 times with varying emphasis to get it to finally get it right.
So literally the first thing it did wa like to me... and then it worked correctly less than 20% of the time... So much better than the Assistant it replaced that never gave me a problem. Totally better.
My car with Google assistant interrupted my conversation with my girlfriend yesterday and started giving me a haiku very loudly for no reason. I guess it was listening and thought we said haiku...
At least it made us laugh. But technology is ridiculous right now. So much shit we don't want or need.
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The cost in preventable deaths, had we been continuing protein research instead of pouring the world’s resources into a fancy autocorrect, is incalculable.
But you need to understand, preventing deaths doesn't make Google any money. Please think about the poor corporation!
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alphafold isn't sunsetting, they are dismantling the original research team. its still active and being worked on
It looks like the open source project is dead and Google has transferred only some of the researchers to a for-profit pharmaceutical-to-be company.
This company appears to have gotten $600 million thanks to Jared Kushner's brother back in 2025
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