alt Hacker NewsI don't think DM is the only lab doing high-impact AI applications research, but they really seem to punch above their weight in it. Why is that or is it just that they have better technical marketing for their work?
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They have been at it for a long time and have a lot of resources courtesy of Google. Asking perplexity it says the alphafold 2 database took "several million GPU hours".
DeepMind/Google does a lot more than the other places that most HN readers would think about first (Amazon, Meta, etc). But there is a lot of excellent work with equal ambition and scale happening in pharma and biotech, that is less visible to the average HN reader. There is also excellent work happening in academic science as well (frequently as a collaboration with industry for compute). NVIDIA partners with whoever they can to get you committed to their tech stack.
For instance, Evo2 by the Arc Institute is a DNA Foundation Model that can do some really remarkable things to understand/interpret/design DNA sequences, and there are now multiple open weight models for working with biomolecules at a structural level that are equivalent to AlphaFold 3.
Other labs are definitely doing amazing work too, but often it's either more niche or less public-facing
In biology, Arc Institute is doing great novel things.
Some pharmas like Genentech or GSK also have excellent AI groups.
Well, they are a Google organization. Being backed by a $2T company gives you more benefits than just marketing.
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This one seems like well done research but in no way revolutionary. People have been doing similar stuff for a while...