Protein folding is a an application of generative AI that will probably produce trillions of dollars of value in the long term. It was probably impossible for Google to squeeze that sort of money from researchers who use it, but it proves that the technology definitely useful. Another application that is highly underrated is with robots completing complicated tasks.
I suppose I'm thinking about transformer architecture rather than strictly GenAI, but the computer science aspects of protein folding and GenAI seem like they overlap significantly.
People are using these models to generate candidate molecules for specific purposes. According to some estimates I've seen, their hit rate is about 50% instead of 25-33%, and doesn't take two years.
This is a case for example I wish AI was targeting. However its more likely they will build more benchmarks and target dev's/SWE's quickly and hard because that's probably what their VC's want them to do. The domains that will generally benefit society - that's more of a maybe they might do later.
They just released a benchmark today to try to attempt it (OpenAI).
