Alpha Fold: How DeepMind's AI Revolutionized Molecular Biology

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Key takeaways

Transcript

Episode notes

AI is getting bigger and more intelligent, and is able to take on new abilities.
AlphaGo was an AI that was trained to play the board game Go, and it got very good at that.
Later, they started applying the same technology to other fields, and found that it was very accurate in predicting the structures of human proteins and proteins in nature.

When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days later, however, Kevin logged back on and ended up having a conversation with Bing's new chatbot that left him so unsettled he had trouble sleeping afterward.

In that two-hour back-and-forth, Bing morphed from chipper research assistant into Sydney, a diabolical home-wrecker that declared its undying love for Kevin, vented its desires to engineer deadly viruses and steal nuclear codes, and announced, chillingly, "I want to be alive. 😈"

The transcript of this conversation set the internet ablaze. And it left many wondering: “Is Sydney … sentient?” It's not. But the whole experience still fundamentally changed Kevin's views on the power (and potential peril) of AI. He joins us today to talk about where this technology is headed.