In November 2020, Alphabet’s subsidiary DeepMind got the scientific community excited with its progress in solving the 50-year-old ‘protein-folding problem’.
Across the world, DeepMind’s creation, AlphaFold, made headlines celebrating this breakthrough. The Guardian said DeepMind had cracked a problem that “stumped researchers for half a century”, Nature said DeepMind made a “gigantic leap in solving protein structures”, BBC said “one of biology’s biggest mysteries” had been “largely solved by AI”, and New York Times announced this could “accelerate drug discovery”.
