ML has not solved protein folding. What it did do was dramatically advance the state of the art of protein structure prediction, a much easier problem, and not

ML has not solved protein folding. What it did do was dramatically advance the state of the art of protein structure prediction, a much easier problem, and not really solved. In principle, being able to predict protein structures with high accuracy could greatly enhance the rate at which we can understand human diseases and come up with treatments and cures. In practice.... that's not really true. BUt it's still nice to be able to point to a specific ML model and say "this 30+ year problem was substantially addressed"; it shows people banged their heads on something for 30 years, got stuck, and finally ML found a nice way out