[Myrddin]

Physical chemistry and x-ray crystallography was the state of the art when I was in school at UCSD in the 1974 to 1976 timeframe. Purifying and crystallizing the protein often required the better part of a year. Getting the x-ray diffraction patterns and doing the detailed analysis was even more difficult. The ability to predict the physical structure using only computational methods is a huge win.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Wow, you lived it! So the AlphaFold breakthrough must be really meaningful to you with that lived experience.

[Honorary Serb]

But AI-based drug discovery is not quite there yet:

From AI:

Limitations and Challenges While the technology provides high-confidence maps, it is not a first-principles physics simulator. Current challenges include dealing with protein flexibility (proteins naturally shift between shapes), the massive expanse of chemical space to search through, and the need for subsequent wet-lab testing to validate the AI-designed compounds.