AlphaFold Changed Science. After 5 Years, It’s Still Evolving

WIRED spoke with DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli about the recent past—and promising future—of the Nobel Prize-winning research project that changed biology and chemistry forever.

AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence system developed by Google DeepMind, has just turned five. Over the past few years, we've periodically reported on its successes; last year, it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Until AlphaFold's debut in November 2020, DeepMind had been best known for teaching an artificial intelligence to beat human champions at the ancient game of Go. Then it started playing something more serious, aiming its deep learning algorithms at one of the most difficult problems in modern science: protein folding. The result was AlphaFold2, a system capable of predicting the three-dimensional shape of proteins with atomic accuracy.

Its work culminated in the compilation of a database that now contains over 200 million predicted structures, essentially the entire known protein ...