And scientifically speaking, this is really good.
What is protein-mapping and what do board games have to do with any of this?
Its really complex, but heres the gist: proteins are the worker bees inside living cells.
They do all sorts of stuff from maintaining your fluid balance to repairing damaged tissue and fighting disease.
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Mapping them is incredibly useful, because it allows us to figure out what they do.
DeepMind was founded to tackle some of the biggest open challenges in technology and science.
Chess and Go were just means to an end.
What is protein-folding and why should I care?
Its exactly what it sounds like.
How a protein is formed determines its function.
There are hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body.
DeepMinds AI can speed up this process exponentially, and thats huge.
Understanding how proteins work could revolutionize disease fighting, drug discovery, and the field of medical diagnosis.
So what did DeepMind actually do?
Figuring out all the potential protein structures isnt just difficult because of the sheer numbers.
We cant look at proteins under a microscope so were forced to examine them via other scientific observations.
But last year DeepMind showed it can produce accurate predictions of a proteins structure using AI software called AlphaFold.
Now, the company is releasing hundreds of thousands of predictions made by the program to the public.
So whats your problem?
In fact, its freaking awesome.
Ill ask again then, what the heck is your problem?
Pop culture aficionados will recognize this as the situation Britney Spears is currently fighting to get out of.
Obviously Alphabet isnt a government, so Im using to the term as an analogy for our current reality.
And that reality is this: Alphabet runs DeepMind at a loss.
That means that DeepMind would not have accomplished this feat without Alphabets money.
It would have gone bankrupt getting here.
So its definitely true that Alphabet accelerated DeepMinds research.
And how is that bad!?!
For the love of Britney, spit it out dude!
Sundar Pichai (the CEO of Alphabet and Google) is acting like Batman.
And, like Batman, Sundar Pichai is gaining access to technology that no-one else has.
We coulddefinitelyhave that technology in a year or two if someone spent a few billion dollars developing it.
But, in reality, Batarangs are a stupid idea.
DeepMinds AI systems are not a stupid idea.
But theyre also not unique.
DeepMind picked up where other researchers left off in protein mapping and finished the job.
Not because the other researchers werent smart enough or talented enough, but because it had virtually limitless funding.
If Pichai wants to develop a warp drive, for example, he will.
The shareholders at Alphabet are.
Okay, I see your point.
But what does it mean?
Whats the worst that could happen?
I said… we have a Prime example.
Its just not funny.Youre talking about Amazon.
Remember when Jeff Bezos was just some middle-aged-looking balding guy who put a bookstore on the internet?
Amazon posted $389 billion in profits last year.
Imagine how many small businesses had to go bankrupt for that to happen.
Now apply that to academia.
That funding is going to dry up.
But thats not going to happen.
Todays breakthrough is a truly wonderful thing.
The science community deserves a round of applause for this accomplishment.
DeepMinds open-source protein mapping system will change the world for the better in a lot of ways.
And its awesome that Alphabet decided to make it open-source.
But its not free.
Were all going to pay, one way or another.
