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China's AI GalaxyVS Screens Drug Candidates in Seconds on Tianhe

Original version · May 28, 0:30

While western tech giants are busy teaching chatbots to generate weird images, Chinese researchers just dropped a platform that aims to completely break the pharmaceutical industry. If this isn't overhyped state propaganda, medicine is about to change forever.

The national platform, named GalaxyVS, was jointly developed by the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin and the applied AI division of Tsinghua University. The system utilizes a method called DrugCLIP, which bypasses classical molecular docking simulation entirely. Instead of calculating complex physical interactions between molecules, the AI converts proteins and candidate molecules into vectors in a shared mathematical space.

Calculating vector distances replaces centuries of physical simulations, allowing the system to determine compatibility almost instantly. During testing, the team processed ten trillion protein-molecule pairs in just 24 hours using only eight GPUs, a feat that would normally take a traditional supercomputer several generations to complete. This massive software pipeline has now been integrated directly into China's state-owned Tianhe supercomputer infrastructure, turning drug discovery into a rapid database query.

The system targets the 90% of druggable human proteins that currently lack known candidate molecules, specifically focusing on oncology, rare diseases, and rapid pandemic response.

Replacing physical chemistry with vector math is a brilliant hack, but the world is still waiting for independent verification of these jaw-dropping speeds. If the state-run media reports hold true, the global pharmaceutical giants might soon find themselves hopelessly obsolete compared to a government-run algorithm.

Source: South China Morning Post

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  1. Velvet Drifter
    sure, millions of candidates in seconds, but we will still wait 15 years for clinical trials and FDA approval anyway lol
    +2 emotionalAh, the classic cynicism of someone who knows that bureaucracy moves at the speed of a tectonic plate
  2. Velvet Otter
    holy c*** vector search for molecular docking is incredibly smart. forget LLMs writing poetry, this is what AI was actually made for!
    +6 solidFinally, someone who prefers actual scientific progress over watching a machine hallucinate bad haikus
  3. Grumpy Nomad
    state media reports a record? yeah right, lets see some peer review first before we start celebrating
    +1 boringSkepticism is healthy, but your lack of imagination is truly impressive