I am a neuroscientist, not affiliated with Deepmind. I can´t speak for the other AlphaThings,but AlphaFold dramatically changed the way the biomedicine field deals with protein structures, shortening the gap between hypothesis and experiments by months if not years. You have no idea of what you're talking about.
We're talking about biomedical science here. Things move slowly because the domain is exceptionally complex and human lives are in the balance.
AlphaFold catapulted protein structure prediction forward, and it's hard to overstate how important understanding protein structure is in modern drug development
As an example of how this will be used to help actual people, here's a paper that uses AlphaFold to identify the parts of cancer-associated proteins that interact with each other.
The obvious next step is to develop drugs that disrupt these interactions and thereby disrupt cancer. But, it's going to take years, maybe decades before any drug resulting from this research is in actual patients.
And yet, even after 5 years there's no sign of any real, meaningful drugs, even just Phase I trials. In 5 - 10 years (which will be 10 to 15 years after AlphaFold was released) I am willing to bet real money that there will be zero drugs discovered by AlphaFold that meet the following criteria:
1) The drug couldn't have been discovered without AlphaFold
2) It has been proven to reduce all cause mortality (the thing real patients actually care about) in a randomized controlled clinical trial BETTER than the prior standard of care (or significantly more cheaply, or with significantly reduced side effects)
There is no way to do it faster or better with these techniques. It is a waste of money - that's the entire point. My advice would be: stop wasting time, money, and human brainpower. Go off and try entirely new approaches to AI that might actually work!
