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AlphaFold AI found thousands of possible psychedelics. Will its predictions help drug discovery?

Friday - January 19 - 2024 

In this week’s newsletter :

• AlphaFold AI found thousands of possible psychedelics. Will its predictions help drug discovery?

• Samsung’s latest Galaxy phones offer live translation over phone calls, texts

• BMW will deploy Figure’s humanoid robot at South Carolina plant

• The Rabbit R1: all the latest news about this hare-raising AI gadget

• AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says

HEADLINES

AlphaFold AI found thousands of possible psychedelics. Will its predictions help drug discovery?
Summary:
Researchers have used the protein-structure-prediction tool AlphaFold to identify1 hundreds of thousands of potential new psychedelic molecules —

which could help to develop new kinds of antidepressant. The research shows, for the first time, that AlphaFold predictions — available at the touch of a button

— can be just as useful for drug discovery as experimentally derived protein structures, which can take months, or even years, to determine.

The development is a boost for AlphaFold, the artificial-intelligence (AI) tool developed by DeepMind in London that has been a game changer in biology.

The public AlphaFold database holds structure predictions for nearly every known protein. Protein structures of molecules implicated in disease are used in

the pharmaceutical industry to identify and improve promising medicines. But some scientists had been starting to doubt whether AlphaFold’s predictions

could stand in for gold standard experimental models in the hunt for new drugs.

“AlphaFold is an absolute revolution. If we have a good structure, we should be able to use it for drug design,” says Jens Carlsson, a computational chemist at

the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Samsung’s latest Galaxy phones offer live translation over phone calls, texts
Summary:
At Samsung’s launch event today, where the company introduced its AI-powered Galaxy S24 line of smartphones, the company introduced how AI could improve

the calling experience with a new Live Translation feature. The feature, one of several translation features coming to the new smartphones, allows customers to

make or receive a call in a language they don’t speak and then receive a live translation of the call both audibly and on the screen.

The company demoed the AI technology onstage at today’s Unpacked event, showing how someone could use the new feature to make a restaurant

reservation, even though they didn’t speak Spanish. Within the native Call app, the conversation was translated immediately after they spoke to the other

person on the phone. That person could then respond in their own language — in this case, Spanish, which was then translated again into the caller’s language, English.

“It’s like having your own personal interpreter on your calls,” noted Samsung VP of Product Management, Drew Blackard.

The live translation feature will launch with support for audio and text translations for up to 13 languages, Samsung said. In addition, all the translation happens on-device, so Samsung owners’ phone calls remain private.

The feature will also remember your language settings and which language each of your contacts speaks, so you don’t have to make updates before your conversation. This could be useful for people making a lot of international calls, as well as for frequent travelers, the company suggested.

BMW will deploy Figure’s humanoid robot at South Carolina plant
Summary:
Figure today announced a “commercial agreement” that will bring its first humanoid robot to a BMW manufacturing facility in South Carolina. The

Spartanburg plant is BMW’s only in the United States. As of 2019, the 8 million-square-foot campus boasted the highest yield among the German

manufacturer’s factories anywhere in the world.

BMW has not disclosed how many Figure 01 models it will deploy initially. Nor do we know precisely what jobs the robot will be tasked with when it starts work.

Figure did, however, confirm with TechCrunch that it is beginning with an initial five tasks, which will be rolled out one at a time.

While folks in the space have been cavalierly tossing out the term “general purpose” to describe these sorts of systems, it’s important to temper

expectations and point out that they will all arrive as single- or multi-purpose systems, growing their skillset over time. Figure CEO Brett Adcock likens the

approach to an app store — something that Boston Dynamics currently offers with its Spot robot via SDK.

Likely initial applications include standard manufacturing tasks such as box moving, pick and place and pallet unloading and loading — basically the sort of

repetitive tasks for which factory owners claim to have difficulty retaining human workers. Adcock says that Figure expects to ship its first commercial robot within

a year, an ambitious timeline even for a company that prides itself on quick turnaround times.

The Rabbit R1: all the latest news about this hare-raising AI gadget
Summary:
With artificial intelligence being so prevalent across, well, just about everything these days, it’s no small feat for AI developers to make their products stand out

among the deluge. Very few have managed to capture as much attention as Rabbit, the AI startup that’s managed to sell 40,000 units of its standalone $199

R1 gadget within eight days of launching the device at CES in January this year.

The AI-powered Rabbit OS behind the Rabbit R1 is essentially a dedicated virtual assistant that’s designed to interact with your favorite apps like a kind of

universal controller. The OS is built upon a “Large Action Model” trained to interact with common apps like Spotify and Uber to get things done; from

sending messages, controlling music, making online purchases, and more.

At around half the size of an iPhone, the orange Rabbit R1 gadget was designed in collaboration with Teenage Engineering, and features a 2.88-inch touchscreen,

a scrolling navigation wheel, and a rotating camera. It’s a little reminiscent of the Playdate handheld game console.

We’re keeping track of all the latest updates surrounding the Rabbit R1’s launch below so that nothing gets buried in the hype — providing the device lives up to its sizable expectations.

AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says
Summary:
IMF's managing director Kristalina Georgieva says "in most scenarios, AI will likely worsen overall inequality".

Ms Georgieva adds that policymakers should address the "troubling trend" to "prevent the technology from further stoking social tensions".

The proliferation of AI has put its benefits and risks under the spotlight.

The IMF said AI is likely to affect a greater proportion of jobs - put at around 60% - in advanced economies. In half of these instances, workers can expect to benefit from the integration of AI, which will enhance their productivity.

In other instances, AI will have the ability to perform key tasks that are currently executed by humans. This could lower demand for labour, affecting wages and even eradicating jobs.

Meanwhile, the IMF projects that the technology will affect just 26% of jobs in low-income countries.

It echoes a report from Goldman Sachs in 2023, which estimated AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs - but said there may also be new jobs alongside a boom in productivity.

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