DeepMind's AI biologist can decipher secrets of the machinery of life

An AI system developed by UK-based company DeepMind has achieved the long-sought-after goal of accurately predicting the shape of proteins from their sequence alone, a key part of understanding how the machinery of life works. In a competition, AlphaFold was able to match two-thirds of the results achieved by humans doing expensive and time-consuming lab experiments. "I was really wowed when I saw it," says John Moult at the University of Maryland, one of the competition's organisers. "This is the first time we've come close to approaching experimental usefulness, which is pretty extraordinary." Proteins are vital for life.