Yeah it’s a really strange title for the actual work, it’s like saying bic pens helped find x y z simply because they used them to take notes.

With all the money cutting happening, I am not surprised they are joining the bandwagon to get some investors...

I just read some days ago here on HN an interesting link which shows that more than 70% of VC funding goes straight to "AI" related products.

This thing is affecting all of us one way or another...

> The AlphaFold3 analysis (the AI contribution) literally accounts for a few panels in a supplementary figure - it didn't even help guide their choice of small molecule inhibitors since those were already known.

(Disclaimer: I'm the author of a competing approach)

Searching for new small-molecule inhibitors requires going through millions of novel compounds. But AlphaFold3 was evaluated on a dataset that tends to be repetitive: https://olegtrott.substack.com/p/are-alphafolds-new-results-...

Historically it's "superstar researcher discovers something new" where the superstar researcher actually relies on the research of hordes of grad students and postdocs.

Yes I do agree that much of the work was done using conventional methods and quite little was done with AI. AI model did do the folding though which was IMO critical to understand the structure and see the secondary substructure.

The title is clickbaity, it would be useful to stress that AI solves a very specific problem here that is extremely hard to do otherwise. It is like a lego piece.

It's helpful when reading these kinds of things to realize what you're reading. This isn't research. It's a press release. The author lists himself as a "Public Information Officer" for UC San Diego. Looking back through his article archives, it appears most, if not all, of the press releases make heavy emphasis of technology used by the research rather than anything about the research itself.

Go the current very last page and he's hyping up nanotech in 2015, which as far as I'm aware, didn't end up panning out or really going anywhere. https://today.ucsd.edu/archives/author/Liezel_Labios/P260

Was going to say about the same thing. I have some background in biomedical research a while ago, and I could tell that on the high level the main body of the work here is similar to the methodology used in tons of research that were already done many years ago. People have already been using various machine learning/deep learning methods for a long time, and this is definitely not something significant that the headline tries to make or how people are perceiving it. Not to discount their work, but really, not too much to see for the average reader on the Internet.

In other words, this is something that happens in the field all the time, most of which don't get any attention from people outside the field, were it not because of the "AI" buzzword in the article.

I think the authors of this article probably sought to highlight the fact that AI is now being used in medical research, rather than credit it with all the work (see "helps unravel" as opposed to "unravels").

I agree but it says something about the level of interest and confidence people have in the current state of Alzheimer’s research.

How many people would have read the article if it didn’t mention AI?

Press releases like this are published for the purposes of securing funding. Medical research departments at universities are currently under siege by the federal government. Emphasizing the use of AI is a great way to avoid Elon Musk's search, replace and destroy operation for research funding.

At the end of the paper it says

> *These authors contributed equally

so your position is satisfied by listing an AI amongst those authors

Wish I could upvote this more!

Honestly, the fact that the core discovery still relied so heavily on classic biochemistry and experimental validation actually makes it even more impressive to me

[EDIT: people downvoting this, how about you explain what you object to in it]

> It's really a bummer to see this marketed as 'AI Discovers Something New'.

The headline doesn't suggest that. It's "AI Helps Unravel", and that seems a fair and accurate claim.

And that's true for the body of the article, too.

It’s “AI helps unravel”, not “AI discovers”. And it’s newsworthy, as AI-assisted discoveries are not yet boringly well-known.

I think it’s cool to see, and a good counterpoint to the “AI can’t do anything except generate slop” negativity that seems surprisingly common round here.

Thanks for highlighting this

> The authors in the actual paper carried out an enormous amount of work, the vast majority of which is relatively standard biochemistry and cell biology - nothing to do with computational techniques.

OK but if the AI did all the non-standard work, then that's even more impressive, no?