AlphaFold - The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done

Veritasium · 11M views · 2025-02-10 · 24:52

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Overview

A Veritasium video on AlphaFold, DeepMind's protein structure prediction system, and the protein design work it enabled. It features interviews with John Jumper and with David Baker's protein design group and explains why predicting protein folding matters.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as an accessible explainer of AlphaFold and as an example of narrow, specialized ML delivering real scientific breakthroughs.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2025–2026

Topics

Biology & biotechnology Machine learning & deep learning

What people said

molf · 2025-02 · Strong recommendation
> The first snakebite antivenom was made in the mid-1890s and the method has changed little since: snakes are “milked” for their venom, which is injected into horses or sheep and the antibodies that their immune systems then produce are extracted via the animals’ blood. This is expensive, and many people develop allergies to the antibodies. A cool practical application of DeepMind's AlphaFold is that it allows one to "design" proteins because it is now possible to predict how they will fold. [0] This means it is possible to create synthetic protein antibodies that neutralise snake venom, specifically designed for humans [1]. There is a recent Veritasium video [2] that contains a great explanation. The whole video is worth a watch! [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]
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AntonyGarand · 2026-07 · Recommendation
To learn more about AlphaFold and its importance, I would recommend the Veritasium video[0]: AlphaFold - The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done [0]: [VIDEO]
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anon7000 · 2025-03 · Reference
> everything else: not much of anything achieving real, deep value. Lots of anecdotal use cases like drafting emails. Well, this is what people are missing IMO. Yeah, general purpose chatbots can’t solve advanced problems. However, models and pipelines (using similar technology as chabots) specifically built for certain tasks can achieve really incredible results — like in the area of protein folding ( [VIDEO] ) I think there is a lot of potential, but most companies are just slapping a chatbot (which uses some other company’s models) on their app and calling it a day. Very few are taking a deep look at how ML could actually solve real problems.
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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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