I think it's fair to say that it (where "it" is defined as "DeepMind's contribution to the protein folding problem") hasn't yet given us massive improvements to the human condition.

It might, and in fact I think it probably will. But it hasn't yet.

When the biggest criticism of deep mind is it hasn't literally saved the world yet, i think that is pretty telling about how impressive it really is.

That isn't the criticism at all. The criticism is that it hasn't done ANYTHING, and has probably been a net negative since human brainpower and energy costs are being spent on (so far) useless technology for 5 years. It's not that it hasn't saved the world, it's that it's worse than useless.

To be fair I have read that while impressive, still has little practical application?

Name one improvement. Just one thing that has ACTUALLY helped real life humans and been a net positive since AlphaFold's inception 5 years ago.

We're talking about biomedical science here. Things move slowly because the domain is exceptionally complex and human lives are in the balance.

AlphaFold catapulted protein structure prediction forward, and it's hard to overstate how important understanding protein structure is in modern drug development

As an example of how this will be used to help actual people, here's a paper that uses AlphaFold to identify the parts of cancer-associated proteins that interact with each other.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pro.4479

The obvious next step is to develop drugs that disrupt these interactions and thereby disrupt cancer. But, it's going to take years, maybe decades before any drug resulting from this research is in actual patients.

There are dozens of other papers like this.

And yet, even after 5 years there's no sign of any real, meaningful drugs, even just Phase I trials. In 5 - 10 years (which will be 10 to 15 years after AlphaFold was released) I am willing to bet real money that there will be zero drugs discovered by AlphaFold that meet the following criteria:

1) The drug couldn't have been discovered without AlphaFold 2) It has been proven to reduce all cause mortality (the thing real patients actually care about) in a randomized controlled clinical trial BETTER than the prior standard of care (or significantly more cheaply, or with significantly reduced side effects)

Send them your resume or ideas about how to do it faster and better, it could help !

There is no way to do it faster or better with these techniques. It is a waste of money - that's the entire point. My advice would be: stop wasting time, money, and human brainpower. Go off and try entirely new approaches to AI that might actually work!

This is such a bizarre take. AlphaFold is faster and better - but it still takes years to develop anything in the life sciences.

It's like pointing to special relativity in 1905 and saying it'll never be useful for anything.

Exactly !

I am a neuroscientist, not affiliated with Deepmind. I can´t speak for the other AlphaThings,but AlphaFold dramatically changed the way the biomedicine field deals with protein structures, shortening the gap between hypothesis and experiments by months if not years. You have no idea of what you're talking about.

Name one real human being that has benefited from this "shortened gap", aside from the CVs and H-Index of the researchers themselves?