DeepMind and Biohub on why AlphaFold hasn't solved protein folding
In a Latent Space panel, Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli and Biohub's Sal Candido said AlphaFold's breakthrough was only a beginning: static structure prediction does not cover protein dynamics, disorder, or whole biological systems. They argued that biology cannot simply import the "bitter lesson" of scaling, and that researchers should define the problem first, then decide whether to invest in modeling, compute or data generation. As one example, they said training protein language models on lower-quality metagenomic sequences can still improve design of real, working proteins, while building a virtual cell still lacks the right data.
It is a reminder that in biology AI, bottlenecks are often about data and problem definition rather than model scale alone.