[FRIAM] Can current AI beat humans at doing science?

[Pieter Steenekamp]

A year or so ago, Deepmind's AlphGo defeated the then world Go-champion Lee
Sedol at a time when leading Ai researchers predicted it will be at least
10 years before AI can reach that level. But the valid question then was -
why so excited? It's just a game. There is an interesting documentary on
youtube about this at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

What's happening now is that AI makes scientific discoveries beyond human
ability.

Is anybody worried where it will end?

I quote from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can
facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an
enormous experimental effort1–4, the structures of around 100,000 unique
proteins have been determined5, but this represents a small fraction of the
billions of known protein sequences6,7. Structural coverage is bottlenecked
by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single
protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address
this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting
the 3-D structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid
sequence, the structure prediction component of the ‘protein folding
problem’8, has been an important open research problem for more than 50
years9. Despite recent progress10–14, existing methods fall far short of
atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here
we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict
protein structures with atomic accuracy even where no similar structure is
known. We validated an entirely redesigned version of our neural
network-based model, AlphaFold, in the challenging 14th Critical Assessment
of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14)15, demonstrating accuracy
competitive with experiment in a majority of cases and greatly
outperforming other methods. Underpinning the latest version of AlphaFold
is a novel machine learning approach that incorporates physical and
biological knowledge about protein structure, leveraging multi-sequence
alignments, into the design of the deep learning algorithm.
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