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> They literally solved protein folding with AI

AlphaFold deserves some hype but this is a tremendous overstatement.



Ha! That’s the hype there. They made predictions, like any other model out there. Their models are better but not close to what we get out of xray crystallography which is a painstaking process.

Protein folding is nowhere near a solved problem. A third of proteins don’t have high enough accuracy.

https://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2020/12/02/no-deepmind-h...


It’s not an overstatement:

AlphaFold, developed by the Alphabet-owned company DeepMind, predicted the 3-D structures of almost every known protein—about 200 million in all


I can also make a prediction for every single known protein, it's trivial to do. My own predictions would be uniformly wrong. The question is how accurate AlphaFold's predictions are - of course, this question was almost totally avoided by the news reports and DeepMind press releases. It is accurate enough (and accurate often enough) to be a useful tool but by no means accurate enough to say they "literally solved protein folding."




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