What is the biggest contribution AI has ever made to human society?

People in the AI industry will describe the promise of its value to society to anyone who will listen. Equally there are many more, mostly outside of the industry who are fearful of it and point to a litany of abuses of its use.

Finally, there is a definitive use case that supports the pro AI lobby’s claims.

AlphaFold is already having an impact on the fight against today’s most pressing global health scourge: the COVID-19 pandemic.

AlphaFold is software last created by Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind. It can accurately predict the folding of a protein, based solely on its amino acid sequence, with 92.4% accuracy.

DeepMind has released the source code, making the software available to the biotechnology industry for free.

“So what?”, you might ask. Proteins are long chains of amino acids, the building blocks for life. They are essential to every function a living organism’s body performs. There are around 20,000 of them.

What a protein does depends on its unique 3D structure. Figuring out the shapes proteins fold into is known as the “protein folding problem”, and has stood as a grand challenge in biology for the past 50 years.

Check out detailed explanatory YouTube video on protein folding here and here.

source:https://xkcd.com/1430/

DeepMind also released the database of AlphaFold2’s predictions across 20 other species. In total, it released predictions for 365,000 protein structures. It expects to add 130 million more protein predictions by the end of this year.

AlphaFold2’s ability to predict protein structures will significantly improve and accelerate the drug discovery and development process.

DeepMind plans to release an astounding This shows us how fast the AI can move. It’s going to go from 365,000 to 130 million predictions in just five months.

Industry can test these predictions in the lab, verify the correct ones, update the predictions and thereby improve accuracy.

These updates will feed back into AlphaFold2 creating a virtuous cycle. The AI will learn from its mistakes and produce even more accurate predictions in the future, enabling biotechnology to develop better therapies faster and cheaper.