[HN Gopher] AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
___________________________________________________________________
AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
Author : i_love_limes
Score : 317 points
Date : 2025-06-26 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deepmind.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (deepmind.google)
| dekhn wrote:
| When I went to work at Google in 2008 I immediately advocated for
| spending significant resources on the biological sciences (this
| was well before DM started working on biology). I reasoned that
| Google had the data mangling and ML capabilities required to
| demonstrate world-leading results (and hopefully guide the way so
| other biologists could reproduce their techniques). We made some
| progress- we used exacycle to demonstrate some exciting results
| in protein folding and design, and later launched Cloud Genomics
| to store and process large datasets for analytics.
|
| I parted ways with Google a while ago (sundar is a really
| uninspiring leader), and was never able to transfer into
| DeepMind, but I have to say that they are executing on my goals
| far better than I ever could have. It's nice to see ideas that I
| had germinating for decades finally playing out, and I hope these
| advances lead to great discoveries in biology.
|
| It will take some time for the community to absorb this most
| recent work. I skimmed the paper and it's a monster, there's just
| so much going on.
| bitpush wrote:
| > It's nice to see ideas that I had germinating for decades
| finally playing out
|
| I'm sure you're a smart person, and probably had super novel
| ideas but your reply comes across as super arrogant /
| pretentious. Most of us have ideas, even impressive ones
| (here's an example - lets use LLMs to solve world hunger &
| poverty, and loneliness & fix capitalism), but it'd be odd to
| go and say "Finally! My ideas are finally getting the
| attention".
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Yeah it comes off as braggy, but it's only natural to be
| proud of your foresight
| shadowgovt wrote:
| FWIW, I interpreted more as "This is something I wanted to
| see happen, and I'm glad to see it happening even if I'm not
| involved in it."
| plemer wrote:
| Could be either. Nevertheless, while tone is tricky in
| text, the writer is responsible for relieving ambiguity.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| eliminating ambiguity is impossible. the reader should
| work to find the strongest interpretation of the writer's
| words
| coderatlarge wrote:
| that's a lot to expect of readers... good writing needs
| to give readers every opportunity to find the good in it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It is a lot to expect of readers... It's also explicitly
| asked of us in this forum.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. "Please
| respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what
| someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith."
| perching_aix wrote:
| It's also natural language though, one can find however
| much ambiguity in there as they can inject. It hasn't for
| a single moment come across as pretentious to me for
| example.
|
| Think of all the tiresome Twitter discussions that went
| like "I like bagels -> oh, so you hate croissants?".
| dekhn wrote:
| That's correct. I can't even really take credit for any of
| the really nice work, as much as I wish I could!
| dvaun wrote:
| A charitable view is that they intended "ideas that I had
| germinating for decades" to be from their own perspective,
| and not necessarily spurred inside Google by their
| initiative. I think that what they stated prior to this
| conflated the two, so it may come across as bragging. I don't
| think they were trying to brag.
| alfanick wrote:
| I don't find it rude or pretentious. Sometimes it's really
| hard to express yourself in hmm acceptable neutral way when
| you worked on truly cool stuff. It may look like bragging,
| but that's probably not the intention. I often face this
| myself, especially when talking to non-tech people - how the
| heck do I explain what I work on without giving a primer on
| computer science!? Often "whenever you visit any website, it
| eventually uses my code" is good enough answer (worked on aws
| ec2 hypervisor, and well, whenever you visit any website,
| some dependency of it eventually hits aws ec2)
| camjw wrote:
| 100% but in this case they uh... didn't work on it, it
| seems?
| project2501a wrote:
| From Marx to Zizek to Fukuyama^1, 200 years of Leftist
| thinking nobody has ever came close to say "we can fix
| capitalism".
|
| What makes you think that LLMs can do it?
|
| [1] relapsed capitalist, at best, check the recent Doomscroll
| interview
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| > Sundar is a really uninspiring leader
|
| I understand, but he made google a cash machine. Last quarter
| BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of
| around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B. a 10x profit growth at this scale
| well, its unprecedented, the numbers are inspiring themselves,
| that's his job. He made mistakes sure, but he stuck to google's
| big gun, ads, and it paid off. The transition to AI started
| late but gemini is super competitive overall. Deepmind has been
| doing great as well.
|
| Sundar is not a hypeman like Sam or Cook, but he delivers. He
| is very underrated imo.
| modeless wrote:
| Like Ballmer, he was set up for success by his
| predecessor(s), and didn't derail strong growth in existing
| businesses but made huge fumbles elsewhere. The question is,
| who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?
| bitpush wrote:
| Since we're on the topic of Microsoft, I'm sure you'd agree
| that Satya has done a phenomenal job. If you look
| objectively, what is Satya's accomplishments? One word -
| Azure. Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective
| and strategic decisions. But that's it. The "vibes" for
| Microsoft has changed, but MS hasnt innovated at all.
|
| Satya looked like a genius last year with OpenAI
| partnership, but it is becoming increasingly clear that MS
| has no strategy. Nobody is using Github Copilot (pioneer)
| or MS Copilot (a joke). They dont have any foundational
| models, nor a consumer product. Bing is still.. bing, and
| has barely gained any market share.
| modeless wrote:
| Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source
| under Satya. VSCode, GitHub, and WSL happened during his
| tenure, and probably wouldn't have happened under
| Ballmer. Turning the ship from a focus on protecting
| platform lock-in to meeting developers where they are is
| a huge accomplishment IMO.
| bitpush wrote:
| > Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source
| under Satya. True, but that's just few open source
| projects, albeit influential ones. There are soo many
| other companies doing influential open source projects.
|
| I dont disagree with anything you said because turning a
| ship around is hard. But hand-to-heart, what big tech
| company is truly innovating to the future. Lets look at
| each company.
|
| Apple - bets are on VR/AR. Apple Car is dead. So it is
| just Vision Pro
|
| Amazon - No new bets. AWS is printing money, but nothing
| for the future.
|
| Microsoft - No new bets. They fumbled their early lead in
| AI.
|
| Google - Gemini, Waymo ..
|
| I think Satya gets a lot more coverage than his peer at
| Google.
| modeless wrote:
| Waymo and DeepMind and the TPU program all predate Sundar
| as CEO.
|
| IMO Google should have invested more in Waymo and scaled
| sooner. Instead they partnered with traditional
| automakers and rideshare companies, sought outside
| investment, and prioritized a prestige launch in SF over
| expanding as fast as possible in easier markets.
|
| In other areas they utterly wasted huge initial
| investments in AR/VR and robotics, remain behind in
| cloud, and Google X has been a parade of boondoggles
| (excluding Waymo which, again, predates Sundar and even X
| itself).
|
| You could also argue that they fumbled AI, literally
| inventing the transformer architecture but failing at
| building products. Gemini 2.5 Pro is good, but they
| started out many years ahead and lost their lead.
| coliveira wrote:
| > a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. VSCode,
| GitHub, and WSL
|
| This is all the 1st step of embrace and extinguish.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Diversifying Microsoft away from the traditional cash cow
| of Windows and Office is the single most important
| strategy for Microsoft and he executed it well.
| radialstub wrote:
| > Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective and
| strategic decisions
|
| I am going to have to disagree with this. Azure is number
| 2, because MS is number 1 in business software. Cloud is
| a very natural expansion for that market. They just had
| to build something that isn't horrible and the customers
| would have come crawling to MS.
| modeless wrote:
| You could just as easily make the argument that cloud is
| a very natural expansion for Google given their expertise
| in datacenters and cloud software infrastructure, but
| they are still behind. Satya absolutely deserves credit
| for Microsoft's success here.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I just listened to the Acquired podcast guys talk to
| Balmer. Steve actually deserves a huge amount of the
| credit for Azure that Satya enjoys today.
|
| - Created the windows server product
|
| - Created the "rent a server" business line
|
| - Identified the need for a VM kernel and hired the right
| people
|
| - Oversaw MSFT's build out of web services (MSN, Xbox
| Live, Bing) which gave them the distributed systems and
| uptime know-how
|
| - Picked Satya to take over Azure, and then to succeed
| him
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| No, you couldn't. The natural extension is related to
| customer relationships, familiarity, lock in (somewhat).
|
| Google is not behind capability wise, they are in front
| of MSFT actually. The customer relationships matter a
| whole lot more.
| bogtog wrote:
| > If you look objectively, what is Satya's
| accomplishments?
|
| Managing to keep the MS Office grift going and even
| expand it with MS Teams is something
| com2kid wrote:
| People now days don't understand how genius MS was in the
| 90s.
|
| Their strategy and execution was _insanely_ good, and I
| doubt we 'll ever see anything so comprehensive ever
| again.
|
| 1. Clear mission statement: A PC in very house.
|
| 2. A nationwide training + certification program for
| software engineers and system admins across all of
| Microsoft's tooling
|
| 3. Programming lessons in schools and community centers
| across the country to ensure kids got started using MS
| tooling first
|
| 4. Their developer operations divisions was an insane
| powerhouse, they had an army of in house technical
| writers creating some of the best documentation that has
| ever existed. Microsoft contracted out to real software
| engineering companies to create fully fledged demo apps
| to show off new technologies, these weren't hello world
| sample apps, they were real applications that had months
| of effort and testing put into them.
|
| 5. Because the internet wasn't a distribution platform
| yet, Microsoft mailed out huge binders of physical CDs
| with sample code, documentation, and dev editions of all
| their software.
|
| 6. Microsoft hired the top technical writers to write
| books on the top MS software stacks and SDKs.
|
| 7. Their internal test labs had thousands upon thousands
| of manual testers whose job was to run through manual
| tests of all the most popular software, dating back a
| decade+, ensuring it kept working with each new build of
| Windows.
|
| 8. Microsoft pressed PC OEMs to lower prices again and
| again. MS also put their weight behind standards like
| AC'97 to further drop costs.
|
| 9. Microsoft innovated relentlessly, from online gaming
| to smart TVs to tablets. Microsoft was an early entrant
| in a _ton_ of fields. The first Windows tablet PC was in
| 1991! Microsoft tried to make smart TVs a thing before
| there was any content, or even wide spread internet
| adoption (oops). They created some of the first
| e-readers, the first multimedia PDAs, the first smart
| infotainment systems, and so on and so forth.
|
| And they did all this with a far leaner team than what
| they have now!
|
| (IIRC the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen
| people!)
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| > some of the best documentation that has ever existed.
|
| You have got to be kidding. The 90s was my heyday, and
| Microsoft documentation was _extravagantly_ unhelpful,
| always.
| modeless wrote:
| > the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen
| people!
|
| It showed
|
| CE was a dog and probably a big part of the reason
| Windows Phone failed. Migrating off of it was a huge
| distraction and prevented the app platform from being
| good for a long time. I was at Microsoft and worked on
| Silverlight for a bit back then.
| geodel wrote:
| This is kind of bullshit. One can equally say Satya was
| setup for success by Ballmer as he stepped away graciously
| taking all the blame so new CEO can start unencumbered.
| echelon wrote:
| > who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?
|
| 100% it's Demis.
|
| A Demis vs. Satya setup would be one for the ages.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| He delivered revenue growth by enshittifying Goog's products.
| Gemini is catching up because Demis is a boss and TPUs are a
| real competitive advantage.
| bitpush wrote:
| You either attribute both good and bad things to the CEO,
| or dont. If enshittifying is CEO's fault, then so is
| Gemini's success.
| fwip wrote:
| Why? We've all seen organizations in which some things
| happen because of the CEO, and others happen in spite of
| them.
| jama211 wrote:
| But you don't just get to pick which is which willy nilly
| just to push your opinions
| fwip wrote:
| Right, of course, but I don't see any evidence from which
| to assume that they're picking "willy nilly."
| bitpush wrote:
| Read back what you just wrote. It is literally "willy
| nilly".
|
| "Somethings are because of CEO, and some things are in
| spite of CEO"
|
| And it was "willy nilly" attributed that enshittification
| was because of CEO (how do we know? maybe it was CFO, or
| board) and Gemini because of Demis (how do we know? maybe
| it was CEO, or CFO, or Demis himself).
| zem wrote:
| at the very least, enshittification is a company policy
| and gemini is a specific product.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| You're misunderstanding what he's saying. He's saying
| Google has started enshittifing products and Sundar gets
| the blame for that. Sundar is also the CEO so he gets
| credit for Gemini. Google's playbook is enshittification
| though and if Gemini ever gets a big enough moat, it will
| be enshittified. Even Gemini 2.5 Pro has gotten worse for
| me with the small updates and it's not as good when it
| first launched. Google topped the benchmarks and then
| made it worse.
| fwip wrote:
| I guess I don't understand why you so strongly believe
| that CuriouslyC's comment reflects an uninformed opinion
| without any basis in fact.
|
| I see somebody saying something on here, I tend to assume
| that they have a reason for believing it.
|
| If your opinions differ from theirs, you could talk about
| what you believe, instead of incorrectly saying that a
| CEO can only be responsible for everything or nothing
| that a company does.
| mattigames wrote:
| Not really, pressure to move into AI is so vast that it
| in reality the CEO had little saying about moving into it
| or not, and they already had smart employees to make it a
| reality, vastly different that what happened with
| enshitification which Gemini is part of, just recently
| people were complaining that the turn off button was
| hijacked to start Gemini in their Android phones.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Demis reports to Sundar. All of Demis's decisions would
| have been vetted by and either approved, rejected, or
| refined by Sundar. There's no way to actually distinguish
| how much of the value was from whom, unless you have inside
| info.
| luma wrote:
| The Nobel Committee seemed fairly sure who was
| responsible for what around those parts.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Their brand is almost cooked though. At least the legacy
| search part. Maybe they'll morph into AI center of the
| future, but "Google" has been washed away.
| bitpush wrote:
| World is much.. much bigger than HN bubble. Last year, we
| were all so convinced that Microsoft had it all figured
| out, and now look at them. Billion is a very, very large
| number, and sometimes you fail to appreciate how big that
| is.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Oh I'm conveying opinions other than mines, tech people I
| work with, that are very very removed from the HN mindset
| actually, were shitting on google search for a long time
| this week.
| lukan wrote:
| Google ads are still everywhere, if you google or not.
|
| The question will be, when and how will the LLM's be
| attacked with product placements.
|
| Open marked advertisement in premium models and
| integrated ads in free tier ones?
|
| I still hope for a mostly adfree world, but in reality
| google seems in a good position now for the transition
| towards AI (with ads).
| tiahura wrote:
| _Maybe they 'll morph into AI center of the future_
|
| Haven't you been watching the headlines here on HN? The
| volume of major high-quality Google AI releases has been
| almost shocking.
|
| And, they've got the best data.
| agumonkey wrote:
| who didn't ? I meant in the future, if this becomes a
| long term fruitful economic value (sorry but video and
| image generation have no value, it's laughable and used
| for cheap needs, and most of the time people are very
| annoyed by it).
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I like that you are writing as a defense of Google and
| Sundar.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > The transition to AI started late but gemini is super
| competitive overall.
|
| If by competitive you mean "We spent $75 Billion dollars and
| now have a middle of the pack model somewhere between
| Anthropic and Chinese startup", that's a generous way to put
| it.
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| By competitive, i mean no.1 in LM arena overall, in webdev,
| in image gen, in grounding etc. Plus, leading the chatbot
| arena ELO. Flash is the most used model in openrouter this
| month as well. Gemma models are leading on device stats as
| well. So yes, competitive
| mattlondon wrote:
| Citation needed. Gemini 2.5 pro is one of the best models
| there is right now, and it doesn't look like they're
| slowing down. There is a LLM response to basically every
| single Google search query, it's built into the billions of
| android phones etc. They're winning.
| gordonhart wrote:
| Gemini 2.5 Pro is excellent. Top model in public benchmarks
| and soundly beat the alternatives (including all Claudes
| and that Chinese startup's flagship) in my company's
| internal benchmarks.
|
| I'm no Google lover -- in fact I'm usually a detractor due
| to the overall enshittification of their products -- but
| denying that Gemini tops the pile right now is pure
| ignorance.
| deodorel wrote:
| He might have delivered a lot of revenue growth yea, but
| Google culture is basically gone. Internally we're not very
| far from Amazon style "performance management"
| linotype wrote:
| To upper management types that's a feature not a bug.
| gjvc wrote:
| Tim Cook is the opposite of a hypeman.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a
| quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B.
|
| Google's revenue in 2014 was $75B and in 2024 it was $348B,
| that's 4.64 times growth in 10 years or 3.1 times if
| corrected for the inflation.
|
| And during this time, Google failed to launch any significant
| new revenue source.
| spankalee wrote:
| Did you ride the Santa Cruz shuttle, by any chance? We might
| have had conversations about this a long while ago. It sounded
| so exciting then, and still does with AlphaGenome.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Googler here ---^
|
| I have incredibly mixed feelings on Sundar. Where I can give
| him credit is really investing in AI early on, even if they
| were late to productize it, they were not late to invest in the
| infra and tooling to capitalize on it.
|
| I also think people are giving maybe a little too much credit
| to Demis and not enough to Jeff Dean for the massive amount of
| AI progress they've made.
| nextos wrote:
| I found it disappointing that they ignored one of the biggest
| problems in the field, i.e. distinguishing between causal and
| non-causal variants among highly correlated DNA loci. In genetics
| jargon, this is called fine mapping. Perhaps, this is something
| for the next version, but it is really important to design
| effective drugs that target key regulatory regions.
|
| One interesting example of such a problem and why it is important
| to solve it was recently published in _Nature_ and has led to
| interesting drug candidates for modulating macrophage function in
| autoimmunity: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07501-1
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| Does this get us closer? Pretty uninformed but seems that
| better functional predictions make it easier to pick out which
| variants actually matter versus the ones just along for the
| ride. Step 2 probably is integrating this with proper
| statistical fine mapping methods?
| nextos wrote:
| Yes, but it's not dramatically different from what is out
| there already.
|
| There is a concerning gap between prediction and causality.
| In problems, like this one, where lots of variables are
| highly correlated, prediction methods that only have an
| implicit notion of causality don't perform well.
|
| Right now, SOTA seems to use huge population data to infer
| causality within each linkage block of interest in the
| genome. These types of methods are quite close to Pearl's
| notion of causal graphs.
| ejstronge wrote:
| > SOTA seems to use huge population data to infer causality
| within each linkage block of interest in the genome.
|
| This has existed for at least a decade, maybe two.
|
| > There is a concerning gap between prediction and
| causality.
|
| Which can be bridged with protein prediction (alphafold)
| and non-coding regulatory predictions (alphagenome) amongst
| all the other tools that exist.
|
| What is it that does not exist that you "found it
| disappointing that they ignored"?
| nextos wrote:
| > This has existed for at least a decade, maybe two.
|
| Methods have evolved _a lot_ in a decade.
|
| Note how AlphaGenome prediction at 1 bp resolution for
| CAGE is poor. Just Pearson r = 0.49. CAGE is very often
| used to pinpoint causal regulatory variants.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Naturally, the (AI-generated?) hero image doesn't properly render
| the major and minor grooves. :-)
| jeffbee wrote:
| And yet still manages to be 4MB over the wire.
| smokel wrote:
| That's only on high-resolution screens. On lower resolution
| screens it can go as low as 178,820 bytes. Amazing.
| solarwindy wrote:
| For anyone wondering:
| https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/MGA2_02-07.html
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| when a human does it, its style! when ai does it, you cry about
| your job.
| AntiqueFig wrote:
| Maybe they were depicting RNA? (probably not)
| dekhn wrote:
| No; what they drew doesn't look like real DNA or (duplex
| double stranded) RNA. Both have differently sized/spaced
| grooves (see https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew-
| Dunn-11/publica...).
|
| At least they got the handedness right.
| jeffhwang wrote:
| When I was restudying biology a few years ago, it was making me
| a little crazy trying to understand the structural geometry
| that gives rise to the major and minor grooves of DNA. I looked
| through several of the standard textbooks and relevant papers.
| I certainly didn't find any good diagrams or animations.
|
| So out of my own frustration, I drew this. It's a cross-section
| of a single base pair, as if you are looking straight down the
| double helix.
|
| Aka, picture a double-strand of DNA as an earthworm. If one of
| the earthworms segments is a base-pair, and you cut the
| earthworm in half, and turn it 90 degrees, and look into the
| body of the worm, you'd see this cross-sectional perspective.
|
| Apologies for overly detailed explanation; it's for non-bio and
| non-chem people. :)
|
| https://www.instagram.com/p/CWSH5qslm27/
|
| Anyway, I _think_ the way base pairs bond forces this major and
| minor grove structure observed in B-DNA.
| seydor wrote:
| this is such an interesting problem. Imagine expanding the input
| size to 3.2Gbp, the size of human genome. I wonder if previously
| unimaginable interactions would occur. Also interesting how
| everything revolves around U-nets and transformers these days.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| > Also interesting how everything revolves around U-nets and
| transformers these days.
|
| To a man with a hammer...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Soon we'll be able to get the whole genome up on the
| blockchain. (I thought the /s was obvious)
| mountainriver wrote:
| With the huge jump in RNA prediction seems like it could be a
| boon for the wave of mRNA labs
| iandanforth wrote:
| Those outside the US at least ...
| jebarker wrote:
| I 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?
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| This one seems like well done research but in no way
| revolutionary. People have been doing similar stuff for a
| while...
| Gethsemane wrote:
| Agreed, there's been some interesting developments in this
| space recently (e.g. AgroNT). Very excited for it,
| particularly as genome sequencing gets cheaper and cheaper!
|
| I'd pitch this paper as a very solid demonstration of the
| approach, and im sure it will lead to some pretty rapid
| developments (similar to what Rosettafold/alphafold did)
| nextos wrote:
| In biology, Arc Institute is doing great novel things.
|
| Some pharmas like Genentech or GSK also have excellent AI
| groups.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Arc have just released a perturbation model btw. If it
| reliably beats linear benchmarks as claimed it is a big step
|
| https://arcinstitute.org/news/virtual-cell-model-state
| tim333 wrote:
| 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".
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| It's also a core interest of Demis.
| daveguy wrote:
| Well, they are a Google organization. Being backed by a $2T
| company gives you more benefits than just marketing.
| jebarker wrote:
| Money and resources are only a partial explanation. There's
| some equally and more valuable companies that aren't having
| nearly as much success in applied AI.
| twothreeone wrote:
| Maybe "Release" requires a bit more context, as it clearly means
| different things to different people:
|
| > AlphaGenome will be available for non-commercial use via an
| online API at http://deepmind.google.com/science/alphagenome
|
| So, essentially the paper is a sales pitch for a new Google
| service.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| I wish there's some breakthrough in cell simulation that would
| allow us to create simulations that are similarly useful to
| molecular dynamics but feasible on modern supercomputers. Not
| being able to see what's happening inside cells seems like the
| main blocker to biological research.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I believe this is where quantum computing comes in but could be
| a decade out, but AI acceleration is hard to predict
| andrewchoi wrote:
| The folks at Arc are trying to build this!
| https://arcinstitute.org/news/virtual-cell-model-state
| dekhn wrote:
| STATE is not a simulation. It's a trained graphical model
| that does property prediction as a result of a perturbation.
| There is no physical model of a cell.
|
| Personally, I think arc's approach is more likely to produce
| usable scientific results in a reasonable amount of time. You
| would have to make a very coarse model of the cell to get any
| reasonable amount of sampling and you would probably spend
| huge amounts of time computing things which are not relevant
| to the properties you care amount. An embedding and graphical
| model seems well-suited to problems like this, as long as the
| underlying data is representative and comprehensive.
| noduerme wrote:
| I wish there were more interest in general in building true
| deterministic simulations than black boxes that hallucinate and
| can't show their work.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-26 23:00 UTC)