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A celebrated AI has learned a new trick: How to do chemistry

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By Marc Zimmer

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Very interesting article, well explained, clear and able to get the interest of people to know more about the topic.

It is clear that the AI expertise in chemistry is very limited compared with its development in protein folding, but seeing how this is just some accessory benefit from being trained exclusively with the folding problem it can be motive for optimism, maybe a more variate training including interactions between proteins or between a protein and some substrate could make the machine better at chemistry as well.

Obviously chemist are not going to be out of work soon, but having these kind of tools can make the job much more productive and in the best case scenario new drugs could be discovered in a tiny fraction of the time it would take by manual work.

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Virus,you are a very educated person,you know lots of new chemicals compound were made by accident such as kavlar and nitroglycerin,by the common lab accident,I dreaded chemistry lab in high school,it was fraught with danger, student mixing chemicals compound

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The protein folding problem is a huge advancement, but AI has made strong inroads in many other aspects of chemistry: finding synthetic pathways to target molecules (Chematica), analyzing reaction parameters, studying structure activity relationships, analyzing reaction mechanisms, etc. It is widely believed that within 50 years, the way we do research will fundamentally change.

Yrral, I don't know where you went to school, but high school chemistry lab should not be dangerous, just very basic and safety proven reactions. You are right about serendipity though, many unexpected discoveries came that way (not only in chemistry), but remember, "luck favors the prepared mind". By the way, automation is also one big thing nowadays, and more and more "lab robots" are being developed for safe experiment procedures.

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