Emily Chan
With the help of artificial intelligence, machines now have the power to generate videos, write computer code, create art, hold conversations, and even help further efforts to understand the human body.
In May, Google unveiled an upgraded version of its AlphaFold software, an artificial intelligence technology that predicts the structure and shape of molecules in the human body.
A molecule’s function and behavior can be determined by its shape, so scientists have been studying the connection for years.
The AI tool can accelerate and simplify the process, saving time and labor. It can also lead to new discoveries in vaccine and drug development.
In a study published in the journal Nature, the details of AlphaFold 3, the latest update from Deepmind, which is the central artificial intelligence lab at Google, are described.
The software was first announced in 2018. Another version, AlphaFold 2, was released in 2020, and it came with a lot of improvements.
The next year, an open-source version of AlphaFold was released, along with the predicted three-dimensional shapes of almost all the proteins in the human body. In 2022, two million predicted protein structures were shared.
Scientists used the technology to learn more about the human heart and gain more knowledge about the eggs of extinct birds.
Furthermore, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, employed the software to better understand the coronavirus and pandemics in general. Still, it had its limits.
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