AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
>What is worse than academic groups getting scooped by DeepMind? The fact that the collective powers of Novartis, Merck, Pfizer, etc, with their hundreds of thousands (~million?) of employees, let an industrial lab that is a complete outsider to the field, with virtually no prior molecular sciences experience, come in and thoroughly beat them on a problem that is, quite frankly, of far greater importance to pharmaceuticals than it is to Alphabet. It is an indictment of the laughable “basic research” groups of these companies, which pay lip service to fundamental science but focus myopically on target-driven research that they managed to so badly embarrass themselves in this episode.<p>I wonder, is this because these methods are simply 'not good enough' to really have an application for medicine yet? I know nothing of the pharmaceutical sector, but saying they don't do basic research seems to stretch my world view given their vast profit baselines and government funding for exactly that purpose. Is there someone in the field who knows more?