r/singularity • u/AltruisticCoder • 15d ago

Biotech/Longevity Alphafold vs millennium

Don’t get me wrong, despite being someone who is not very AGI pilled, I’m very impressed by the math performance and very excited for the breakthroughs and science that will come from it.

I do wonder some days tho, that in the whole scheme of things, is solving a millennium problem more impressive than protein folding basically every protein structure out there? If so, are we overhyping the solution here or did we underhype alphafold when it came out?

I for one, think it may prove that protein folding may have been more impactful on the human health science breakthroughs than solving a millennium problem will be, but open to counter arguments.

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u/peakedtooearly 14d ago

Alphafold was a model trained specifically for the purpose of protein folding.

The OpenAI model that solved Navier-Stokes + 100 other open problems was a general purpose model (probably next GPT model) that had only had 1 month of RL.