Watching AlphaFold win the Nobel Prize

I was in the Google DeepMind London office today, when the news broke that AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize. It was pretty electric.

I never worked on AlphaFold unfortunately, but I've always had a personal attachment to the project. In 2013, my very first ML research project was related to protein structure prediction. (We used SVM's -- if only I knew the deep learning revolution had just begun!).

Later, after my PhD, I considered offers to work on drug discovery (at Kyunghyun Cho's Prescient Design, acquired by Genentech) and AI for medicine (as a post-doc with Andrew Ng). However, my research topic, language models, were just taking off.

But now AI for science seems to be becoming real. AlphaFold was just the beginning. What a time to be alive!