DeepMind's AlphaFold wins the CASP13 protein folding contest
DeepMind announced that AlphaFold had placed first at CASP13, the international competition in protein structure prediction, held in Cancún, Mexico. It beat 98 competing systems and predicted the structure of 25 of 43 proteins with high accuracy, the product of two years of work. Predicting three-dimensional structure from an amino acid sequence had been a 50-year-old problem, and the result showed AI could outperform human-designed methods on a central question in basic science. It sits outside the generative AI lineage, but it was one of Google's answers to what AI is for. Its successor, AlphaFold2, would compete at CASP14 two years later.