All About AlphaFold — Possibly AI’s Most Important Breakthrough So Far

All About AlphaFold — Possibly AI’s Most Important Breakthrough So Far

It can be tough to differentiate between substance and hype in artificial intelligence (AI). To stay humble, it is necessary to ask a simple question: what has AI achieved recently that makes a real difference in the world?

In the summer of 2021, the AI-based subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc., DeepMind, delivered the most potent answer yet to that question in the years-long history of AI research and development: AlphaFold.

But what is AlphaFold? It is an AI-based software platform that will transform and revolutionize our understanding of biology. The company has already done some groundbreaking development leveraging AI techniques to predict the structure of proteins.

Before we discuss this discovery in detail, let’s explore the factors that make this discovery so important.

Solving One of the Greatest Mysteries of Life

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, American Biochemist Christian B. Anfinsen made a historic prediction that would change the face of biology a few decades later. He predicted that “It should in principle be possible to determine the 3D shape of a protein solely on the 1D string of molecules that comprise it.” Christian B. Anfinsen shared his Nobel Prize with Stanford Moore and…