My brother worked in protein folding (although his statement about specifically AlphaFold was years after he left that field) but I showed him the AlphaFold results from like 5 years ago and his reaction was "oh ... Yeah they solved protein folding"
So at least according to him we've lived in that world for the last 5 years.
As a person working with / tangentially to people in the same field I would say that it's made things faster and more scalable, but protein structure isn't the be all end all of things. Researchers use AlphaFold a lot for filtering potential candidates, but that is only one step in a lot of steps. A SNP mutation -> protein structure change -> functional change is already difficult without then considering that the vast majority of mutations that create function change in humans are not in exons, so something like AlphaFold (in the form I'm familiar with) would be useless for those as well.
Eventually though an AI system that can go mutation->function change is entirely possible, although it is much much further in the future. In that case though I think you'll be quite close to a future where combined with things like CRISPR therapeutic treatment for all heritable disease would be possible.
Is that not the same as saying maths is solved thanks to spreadsheets/excel? All of science and technology is to some extent automation and increased speed of what used to be slow and laborious.
My sincerest response is that we are now post-moore's-law[1]; instead of "transistor density doubling every 18 months," I have (over the past year of Perplexity.AI) more of the belief that "global intelligence will double every 18 months."
Just my ¢¢ half-sanity.
[1] Isn't a single hydrogen diatom just 1nm wide? How much smaller can transistor gates be safely assembled? Didn't we physically stop getting physically smaller around 14nm?
It is revolutionary in what it does. There's no question about it. The problem is that a lot of people think it does something different or more practical, like creating new drugs. That is one of the ultimate goals, but it's way down the road.
Uh ok. Now I feel obliged to say that AlphaFold is the obvious outcome you'd get from having a company dedicated to winning games deciding to win at CASP.
To me, "solving" structure prediction (explicitly acknowledging there are areas where AF doesn't make accurate predictions), is a clear and satisfying win, although it still doesn't answer some of the fundamental physics questions around folding.
I am glad to see the existence proof but want to see more outcomes; in particular, I'd like to see a lab-in-the-loop that actually produces something of high value (higher than the cost of building the lab-in-the-loop).
So at least according to him we've lived in that world for the last 5 years.
As a person working with / tangentially to people in the same field I would say that it's made things faster and more scalable, but protein structure isn't the be all end all of things. Researchers use AlphaFold a lot for filtering potential candidates, but that is only one step in a lot of steps. A SNP mutation -> protein structure change -> functional change is already difficult without then considering that the vast majority of mutations that create function change in humans are not in exons, so something like AlphaFold (in the form I'm familiar with) would be useless for those as well.
Eventually though an AI system that can go mutation->function change is entirely possible, although it is much much further in the future. In that case though I think you'll be quite close to a future where combined with things like CRISPR therapeutic treatment for all heritable disease would be possible.