Oh yes, and how many chemicals did it cause to spew out and how much water did it deplete? That solution won’t matter if life is dead anyway.
Comment on AI Won't Solve Your Existential Crisis (And That's Perfectly Fine)
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 1 day agoIt won’t solve anything
Go tell that to AlphaFold which solved a decades‑old problem in biology by predicting protein structures with near lab‑level accuracy. Overnight it gave researchers the 3D shapes of almost every known protein, something humans couldn’t crack, and it’s already speeding up drug discovery and enzyme design.
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 1 day ago
If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.
Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.
So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.
belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 1 day ago
It could have been done without burning the earth down to get there.