[jeffxtreme]

Five years ago, I would have said the following:

"If someone produces an AI that you give a sequence and it tells you the protein conformation, I'd be extremely impressed".

Sure there are many more things to solve in this space; but that doesn't take away that this is an impressive achievement and does unlock quite a few things (including making more tractable the problem you just brought up). I'm excited to see what DeepMind works on now and what the new state of the world will be just five years from now.

[fabian2k]

I think I have to clarify that my response was to a large part to the "this will change all our lives" part, and might look too negative on its own. I'm very, very impressed by these results, but that still doesn't mean that we just solved biology. If this works that well on folding, this could mean that a lot of other stuff that simply didn't work well in silico might come into reach.

I'm maybe overcompensating for the tech-centric population here, with some comments speculating for very near and drastic impacts from discoveries like this. Biology and life sciences are much slower, and there's always more complexity below every breakthrough. That does tend to push me towards commenting with the more skeptical and sober view here.