Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

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> DeepMind didn't come up with a novel biological insight; they simply pointed their unparalleled AI resources towards a deep learning problem.

What this essentially comes down to is a bunch of teams with high domain expertise and high technical capability was beaten by a team with higher comparative technical capability and lower comparative domain expertise. One has to wonder if one of the teams with higher domain expertise (ie work in the field every day) could achieve better results by improving their technical capabilities, or more aggressively applying their domain knowledge.

The question really comes down to whether DeepMind can beat any hard "game" (chess, go, protein folding etc) better than humans with deep domain expertise.

> What this essentially comes down to is a bunch of teams with high domain expertise and high technical capability was beaten by a team with higher comparative technical capability and lower comparative domain expertise.

The fact that the experts are entrenched in departmental trench wars and crippled by bureaucratic crap on every step is probably a contributing factor. If they were free to advance actual research instead of contributing to some middle manager's manager's agenda, thinks might look different.

This doesn't affect chess and go however ...

Regarding domain expertise, I would guess that this is something you can catch up with within a year.

That's what people outside drug development think. Meanwhile, 70 % of all drugs fail at Stage 2 testing. That's right, experienced pharmacologists at established companies go forward with compounds they believe will succeed, and still in 2 out of 3 cases they are not better than placebo.

I'd hasten to add it's the same in software. We think the experts are right on the edge of performance, accuracy, and success while using all the right tools - meanwhile from the inside, it's a shambles in all but the highest stakes environments with the most qualified teams.

I think the parent is talking about expertise for protein structure prediction, not drug development

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