“Researchers at the DeepMind Technologies artificial-intelligence lab said Thursday they had predicted the structure of nearly all known proteins, a significant advance in biology that will accelerate drug discovery and help address problems such as sustainability and food insecurity.”

Wall Street Journal July 28, 2022

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “DeepMind AI Lab Predicts Structure of Most Proteins” by Stephen Rosenbush, describes how DeepMind’s AlphaFold database has evolved over the last 12 months from an initial dataset of 350,000 proteins to predicting the structure of 214 million proteins which is nearly all known proteins. In this case, the AI neural network has significantly advanced scientific knowledge by processing a set of predictions at a scale and speed not feasible by other methods. This is an excellent illustration of the some of the implications of Artificial Intelligence discussed in “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher and our previous post “Perspectives on AI”.