[paulwetzel]

While I am skeptical about yesterdays award in physics, these are totally deserved and spot on. There are few approaches that will accelerate the field of drug development and chemistry as a whole in a way that the works of these three people will. Congratulations!

[trott]

> There are few approaches that will accelerate the field of drug development and chemistry as a whole in a way that the works of these three people will.

As the author of one such approach, I'm skeptical.

AlphaFold 2 just predicts protein structures. The thing about proteins is that they are often related to each other. If you are trying to predict the structure of a naturally occurring protein, chances are that there are related ones in the dataset of known 3D structures. This makes it much easier for ML. You are (roughly speaking) training on the test set.

However, for drug design, which is what AlphaFold 3 targets, you need to do well on actually novel inputs. It's a completely different use case.

More here: https://olegtrott.substack.com/p/are-alphafolds-new-results-...

[jhbadger]

Protein structures are similar to each other because of evolution (protein families exist because of shared ancestry of protein coding genes). It's not a weird coincidence that helps ML; it's inherent in the problem. Same with drug design -- very, very, few drugs are "novel" as opposed to being analogues of something naturally in the body.

[ackbar03]

I was just wondering when they were going to award the alphafold2 guys the nobel after after seeing Hinton win the physics one. 100% agree, all three of them totally deserve this one. Baker's lab is pretty much keeping Deepmind in check at this point and ensuring open source research is keeping up. Hats off

[theGnuMe]

Baker has been in the protein folding game for a long time and was the leader before Alphafold came in... His generative paper came out what last year (2023)?

I mean this is a fast award cycle.

[refurb]

As someone in the drug discovery business I’m skeptical as I’ve seen many such “advances” flop.

I remember when computer aided drug design first came out (and several “quantum jumps” along the way). While useful they failed often at the most important cases.

New drugs tend to be developed in spaces we know very little about. Thus there is nothing useful for AI to be trained on.

Nothing quite like hearing from the computational scientist “if you make this one change it will improve binding by 1000x”. Then spending 3 weeks making it to find out it actually binds worse.

[cowsandmilk]

Both Rosetta and DeepMind have made contributions outside of protein structure prediction that are far more important for drug discovery.

[hackernewds]

Well deserved! My only qualm is it should've been awarded to the team, vs individuals

It needed Oriol as well doing IC work

[mihaaly]

The physics prize should have went to Elon Musk!

Also I really hope the Nobel Prize of Economics goes to Bill Gates! He facilitated sooo much advances by releasing Excel that this must be recognized!

And based on this year's announcements so far I am not sure that my sarcastic comments should be taken as a joke!

[theGnuMe]

Except Excel has introduced way to many bugs and how many people has it killed?

[tomp]

Are they? What did Demis do?

[onursurme]

He writes software in different areas, so he has the potential to get a Nobel prize in any area soon.

[seydor]

didn't he lead early successes in RL which popularized it and culminated in protein prediction?

[world2vec]

He's founder and CEO of the AI lab that build Alphafold?