The Psychology of Technology Institute

DeepMind recently announced an historic advance toward solving the so-called "protein folding problem," a longstanding and consequential challenge in computational biology. Their AlphaFold program, an AI system made up of multiple deep neural networks, achieved unprecedented predictive accuracy in the annual CASP competition, vastly outstripping the methods deployed by other teams. There are many questions one might ask about AlphaFold. Does it understand the problem it's solving? Does accuracy in prediction really constitute a "solution" to the protein folding problem?