Yes, the actual results are definitely not as impressive as the overly hyped headlines, but there's still a lot. First off, in terms of research building up on top of it, as of today, Pubmed shows 9,364 articles citing their 2021 paper, and Google Scholar shows 21,719 results as a whole[1], but these include non-biomedical papers (e.g. applications of similar ML models to other disciplines).
As for actual applications, it's a bit early, but here's a relatively extensive review from 2023[2], and there's a particularly notable example showing progress on liver cancer [3]. Researchers are still figuring out how to utilize it, e.g. with search mechanisms like Foldseek[4], and I'm sure we'll see a lot over the coming years.
But you're definitely right it's not a silver bullet on its own, and there's still need for actual scientific research. On this note there's this interesting paper on the "illusion of understanding" we get from working with AI.
Hahaha, that reminds me of a joke, I hope I can stop laughing at your comment long enough to catch my breathe to finish this comment…
A Texan, a Californian, and a Utahnian are sitting around a campfire. The Texan stands up, pulls out an antique smith and Wesson and shoots a migrant. The californian asks, “why’d you do that?” And he responded “because god told me to.”
So the utahnian stood up pulled out his fathers hand me down 12 gauge shotgun, and tortured a homosexual. The Californian asked “why’d you do that?” And the utahnian responded “because god told me to.”
So the California stood up and pulled out a stack of papers and handed them to each of the other men.
“What is this” they asked. The Californian responded, “it’s free full health coverage for the both of you.”
They asked, “why’d you do that?”
And the Californian responded “because I think every human alive deserves the dignity of good health.”
One, that the people you want to impress are unimpressed by your effort to impress them.
Two, for the people you want to impress to accept you you have to hide truths of who you are as a person because they would rather discriminate against you for superficial reasons than get to know you.
And from that, you conclude that the people you left behind are to blame more so than these people you want to impress?
> quest to accumulate more data, theories, and information, rather than
You forgot “more money”.