It’s hype like this that breaks the back of the public when “AI doesn’t change anything”. Don’t get me wrong: AlphaFold has done incredible things. We can now create computational models of proteins in a few hours instead of a decade. But the difference between a computational model and the actual thing is like the difference between a piece of cheese and yellow plastic: they both melt nicely but you’d never want one of them in your quesadilla.
It’s hype like this that breaks the back of the public when “AI doesn’t change anything”. Don’t get me wrong: AlphaFold has done incredible things. We can now create computational models of proteins in a few hours instead of a decade. But the difference between a computational model and the actual thing is like the difference between a piece of cheese and yellow plastic: they both melt nicely but you’d never want one of them in your quesadilla.