I’m not talking about the specifics of the architecture.
To the layman, AI refers to a range of general purpose language models that are trained on “public” data and possibly enriched with domain-specific datasets.
There’s a significant material difference between using probabilistic language completion and a model that directly predicts the results of complex processes (like what’s likely being discussed in the article).
It’s not specific to the article in question, but it is really important for people to not conflate these approaches.
FatCrab@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
A quick search turns up that alpha fold 3, what they are using for this, is a diffusion architecture, not a transformer. It works more the image generators than the GPT text generators. It isn’t really the same as “the LLMs”.
holomorphic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I will admit didn’t check because it was late and the article failed to load. I just remember reading several papers 1-2years ago on things like cancer-cell segmentation where the ‘classical’ UNet architecture was beaten by either pure transformers, or unets with added attention gates on all horizontal connections.
MajinBlayze@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I skipped the paper, and it seems pretty cool. I’m not sure I quite follow the “diffusion model-based architecture” it mentioned, but it sounds interesting
FatCrab@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Diffusion models iteratively convert noise across a space into forms and that’s what they are trained to do. In contrast to, say, a GPT that basically performs a recursive token prediction in sequence. They’re just totally different models, both in structure and mode of operation. Diffusion models are actually pretty incredible imo and I think we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of their power. A very fundamental part of most modes of cognition is converting the noise of unstructured multimodal signal data into something with form and intention, so being able to do this with a model, even if only in very very narrow domains right now, is a pretty massive leap forward.