DeepMind's Stunning Breakthrough Shows How AI Could Save Us

The "Techlash" that started last year and flowed steadily through 2020, paints technology and the tech giants that run the world as dark monoliths, casting broad and sometimes sinister shadows across our lives. This week's DeepMind breakthrough is a reminder that the most cutting-edge technology, even those from companies that we no longer fully trust (DeepMind is owned by Alphabet, which owns Google), can alter our lives in demonstrably positive ways. Cade Metz' New York Times piece details how the neural network based DeepMind was used to find a solution to a very difficult biochemistry problem: How to identify protein folds and use that information to figure out what the protein might do and how it could interact with other proteins and even, say, viruses. It's a stunning piece of work because, as AI's are wont to do, DeepMind's "AlphaFold" figured out how to identify a protein's shape in not years, months, or even weeks, but in under an hour. I've been watching DeepMind for years, especially its early triumphs in the game space (it beat champions at the difficult Go game).