The Nobel prize went to AlphaFold, in case anybody is curious. Protein structure prediction, ML (not LLMs in particular much less a chatbot) is useful for that kind of stuff just as it’s useful in things like physical simulations: Accuracy isn’t as good as the full physical model, but it runs so much faster that you can go through tons more data and actually get somewhere with your research. Better to have a million 99% reliable answers than two 100% reliable ones.
It should also be mentioned that the two methods aren’t mutually exclusive, and there’s a ton of synergy between using the old ways (x-ray crystallography and cryo-em) and using the new way (AlphaFold). Because even when you measure the protein structure, the old ways only tell you the shape of the protein but not the skeletal structure of the protein (which is the actual important part), so to my knowledge, there’s a bit of finicking around to figure out how the protein folds into that shape. AlphaFold predicts how the protein folds, so you can cross reference that with the measured shape of the protein to better estimate where the protein skeleton is in the measured shape
Biomedical AI literally won the Nobel prize last year. But LLMs won’t help at all.
Tangentially related, any biomedical outfit that hasn’t bought a shitton of GPUs to run alphafold on is probably mismanaging money.
The Nobel prize went to AlphaFold, in case anybody is curious. Protein structure prediction, ML (not LLMs in particular much less a chatbot) is useful for that kind of stuff just as it’s useful in things like physical simulations: Accuracy isn’t as good as the full physical model, but it runs so much faster that you can go through tons more data and actually get somewhere with your research. Better to have a million 99% reliable answers than two 100% reliable ones.
It should also be mentioned that the two methods aren’t mutually exclusive, and there’s a ton of synergy between using the old ways (x-ray crystallography and cryo-em) and using the new way (AlphaFold). Because even when you measure the protein structure, the old ways only tell you the shape of the protein but not the skeletal structure of the protein (which is the actual important part), so to my knowledge, there’s a bit of finicking around to figure out how the protein folds into that shape. AlphaFold predicts how the protein folds, so you can cross reference that with the measured shape of the protein to better estimate where the protein skeleton is in the measured shape