Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

It seems that to solve the protein folding problem in a fundamental way would require solving chemistry, yet the big lie (or false hope) of reductionism is that discovering the fundamental laws of the universe such as quantum theory doesn't in fact help that much with figuring out the laws/dynamics at higher levels of abstraction such as chemistry.

So, in the meantime (or perhaps for ever), we look for patterns rather than laws, with neural nets being one of the best tools we have available to do this.

Of course ANNs need massive amounts of data to "generalize" well, while protein folding only had a small amount available due to the months of effort needed to experimentally discover how any protein is folded, so DeepMind threw the kitchen sink at the problem, apparently using a diffusion like process in AlphaFold 3 to first determine large scale structure then refine it, and using co-evolution of proteins as another source of data to address the paucity.

So, OK, they found a way around our lack of knowledge of chemistry and managed to get an extremely useful result all the same. The movie, propaganda or not, never suggested anything different, and "at least 90% correct" was always the level at which it was understood the result would be useful, even if 100% based on having solved chemistry / molecular geometry would be better.