AlphaFold 2 at CASP14
The system predicted the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence at accuracy comparable to experiment.
Why it matters
A problem biology had worked at for fifty years was solved, the first time AI produced a result another science needed rather than one for itself.
The assessment was blind, on structures the experimentalists had not yet published, so fitting was ruled out. Median accuracy passed the threshold at which a structure counts as usable for most biological purposes. DeepMind later released predictions for two hundred million proteins. It is the main argument against the view that large models are useful only for text and pictures.