| ▲ | DrierCycle 5 hours ago |
| AlphaFold is optimization, not thinking. Propaganda 'r us. |
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| ▲ | fredoliveira 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Did you watch the documentary? Would probably fare better if you did, because it'd give you the context for the film title. |
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| ▲ | DrierCycle 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm an hour into it, unconvinced. The illusion that agency 'emerges' from rules like games, is fundamentally absurd. This is the foundational illusion of mechanics. It's UFOlogy not science. | | |
| ▲ | fredoliveira 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, two things: it's the last sentence of the film; being on hour into something you're calling propaganda is brave. Anyways. I thought the documentary was inspiring. Deepmind are the only lab that has historically prioritized science over consumer-facing product (that's changing now, however). I think their work with AlphaFold is commendable. | | |
| ▲ | DrierCycle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's science under the creative boundary of binary/symbols. And as analog thinkers, we should be developing far greater tools than these glass ceilings. And yes, having finished the film, it's far more propagandic than it began as. Science is exceeding the envelop of paradox, and what I see here is obeying the envelope in order to justify the binary as a path to AGI. It's not a path. The symbol is a bottleneck. | | |
| ▲ | Zigurd 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Everything between your ears is an electrochemical process. It's all math and there is no "creative boundary." There's plenty to criticize in AI hype that we're going to get to machine intelligence very soon. I suspect a lot of the hype is oriented towards getting favorable treatment from the government if not outright subsidies. But claiming that there are fundamental barriers is a losing bet. | | |
| ▲ | DrierCycle 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It doesn't happen "btwn ears" and math is an illusion of imprecision. The fundamental barrier is frameworks and computers will not be involved. There will be software obviously. But it will never be computed. |
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| ▲ | amitport 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Plenty *commercial* labs frequently prioritized pure science over *immediate* consumer products, but none done so out of charity. Deepmind included. |
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| ▲ | Zigurd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Your mind emerges from a network of neurons. Machine models are probably far from enabling that kind of emergence, but if what's going on between our ears isn't computation, it's magic. | | |
| ▲ | DrierCycle 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not magic. It's neural syntax. And nothing trapped by computation is occurring. It's not a model, it is the world as actions. The computer is a hand-me-down tool under evolution's glass ceiling. This should be obvious: binary, symbols, metaphors. These are toys (ie they are models), and humans are in our adolescent stage using these toys. Only analog correlation gets us to agency and thought. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | MattRix 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is there a fundamental difference between it and true agency/thought? I’m not so sure. | | |
| ▲ | DrierCycle 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Agency will emerge from exceeding the bottleneck of evolution's hand-me-down tools: binary, symbols, metaphors. As long as these unconscious sportscasters for thought "explain" to us what thought "is", we are trapped. DeepMind is simply another circular hamster wheel of evolution. Just look at the status-propaganda the film heightens in order to justify the magic. |
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| ▲ | dboreham 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why is it absurd? Because believing that would break some deep delusion humans have about themselves? |
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| ▲ | Rochus 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not sure why this is downvoted. The comment cuts to the core of the "Intelligence vs. Curve-Fitting" debate. From my humble perspective as a PhD in the molecular biology /biophysics field you are fundamentally correct: AlphaFold is optimization (curve-fitting), not thinking. But calling it "propaganda" might be a slight oversimplification of why that optimization is useful. If you ask AlphaFold to predict a protein that violates the laws of physics (e.g. a designed sequence with impossible steric clashes), it will sometimes still confidently predict a folded structure because it is optimizing for "looking like a protein", not for "obeying physics". The "Propaganda" label likely comes from DeepMind's marketing, which uses words like "Solved"; instead, DeepMind found a way to bypass the protein folding problem. |
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| ▲ | dekhn an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | If there's one thing I wish DeepMind did less of, it's conflating the protein folding problem with static structure prediction. The former is a grand challenge problem that remains 'unsolved' while the latter is an impressive achievment that really is optimization using a huge collection of prior knowledge. I've told John Moult, the organizer of CASP this (I used to "compete" in these things), and I think most people know he's overstating the significance of static structure prediction. Also, solving the protein folding problem (or getting to 100% accuracy on structure prediction) would not really move the needle in terms of curing diseases. These sorts of simplifications are great if you're trying to inspire students into a field of science, but get in the way when you are actually trying to rationally allocate a research budget for drug discovery. | |
| ▲ | tim333 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think if you watch the actual film you'd find they don't claim AlphaFold is thinking. | |
| ▲ | DrierCycle 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm concerned that coders and the general public will confuse optimization with intelligence. That's the nature of propaganda, substituting sleight of hand to create a false narrative. btw an excellent explanation, thank you. |
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| ▲ | aschla 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html |
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| ▲ | dwa3592 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| what is thinking? |
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| ▲ | DrierCycle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sharp wave ripples, nested oscillations, cohering at action-syntax. The brain is "about actions" and lacks representations. | |
| ▲ | __patchbit__ 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Creatively peeling the hyper dimensional space in the scope of simplectic geometry, markhov blanket and helmholtz invariance???? |
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