Human + Machine, Updated and Expanded

1 What You Need to Know about Generative AI Navigating the New Era of Intelligent Technology

The explosive interest in large language models (LLMs) that the release of ChatGPT ignited has obscured one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of AI: AlphaFold2. Developed by Alphabet’s DeepMind, AlphaFold2 can predict the structures of almost every known protein—some two hundred million, including all the proteins in the human genome. In the more than a half-century prior to AlphaFold, structures had been solved for only about 170,000 of those proteins.¹

Consisting of long chains of amino acids, proteins fold to form 3D structures that are the key to the protein’s biological function. Understanding how one-dimensional amino acid sequences ...