DeepMind’s AlphaFold platform, first announced in late 2020, solved one of life’s great mysteries: the protein folding problem. AlphaFold is able to accurately predict the three-dimensional shape of a protein based solely on its one-dimensional amino acid sequence, a landmark achievement that had eluded human researchers for decades. (We have previously argued in this column that AlphaFold represents the single most important achievement in the history of artificial intelligence.)

Because proteins underpin nearly every important activity that happens inside every living being on earth, more deeply understanding their structures and functions opens up profound new possibilities in biology and human health: from developing life-saving therapeutics to improving agriculture, from fighting disease to investigating the origins of life.

In July 2021, DeepMind open-sourced AlphaFold and released a database of 350,000 three-dimensional protein structures. (As a reference point, the total number of protein structures known to mankind prior to AlphaFold was around 180,000.) Then, a few months ago, DeepMind publicly released the structures for another 200 million proteins—nearly all catalogued proteins known to science.

Mere months after DeepMind’s latest release, more than 500,000 researchers from 190 countries have used the AlphaFold platform to access 2 million different protein structures. This is just the beginning.

Breakthroughs of AlphaFold’s magnitude require years for their full impact to manifest.

In 2023, expect the volume of research built on top of AlphaFold to surge. Researchers will take this vast new trove of foundational biological knowledge and apply it to produce world-changing applications across disciplines, from new vaccines to new types of plastics.

If you enjoyed this market, please check out the other 9! https://manifold.markets/group/forbes-2023-ai-predictions

This market is from Rob Toews' annual AI predictions at Forbes magazine. This market will resolve based on Rob's own self-assessed score for these predictions when he publishes his retrospective on them at the end of the year.

Since Rob resolved and graded his 2022 predictions before the end of 2022, I am setting the close date ahead of the end of the year, to (try to) avoid a situation where he posts the resolutions before the market closes. In the event that his resolution post falls in 2024, my apologies in advance. If he hasn't posted resolutions at all by February 1, 2024, I will do my best to resolve them personally, and set N/A for any questions that I can't determine with outside source data.

-----

Edit 2023-07-05: Last year Rob used "Right-ish" to grade some of his predictions. In cases of a similar "Right-ish" (or "Wrong-ish") answer this year, I will resolve to 75% PROB or 25% PROB, respectively. This will apply for similar language too ("mostly right", "partial credit", "in the right direction"). If he says something like "hard to say" or "some right, some wrong", or anything else that feels like a cop-out or 50% answer, I will just call that N/A.

Thanks to Henri Thunberg from this comment in requesting clarification!