Why AlphaFold Didn't Solve Protein Folding — Pushmeet Kohli, Google DeepMind & Sal Candido, Biohub

From the Bitter Lesson of AI scaling to the unsolved mysteries of protein folding, Google DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli and Biohub’s Sal Candido are rethinking what it takes to build AI that truly understands biology. In this special panel moderated by Brandon Anderson, they explore why AlphaFold’s breakthrough was only the beginning, why scaling compute and data alone won’t solve biology, and how the next generation of AI models could transform our understanding of proteins, cells, and human disease. We go deep on the future of AI-driven biology: finding scaling laws in biological data, the tradeoffs between scientific intuition and general-purpose architectures, why protein structure prediction is far from solved, and what it would take to build predictive models of living systems. Pushmeet reflects on the lessons behind AlphaFold, the limits of human interpretability, and whether future frontier models could understand other AI systems better than we can. Sal explains why protein language models may already contain scientific knowledge we haven’t unlocked, how biological modeling must move beyond individual proteins, and why achieving Biohub’s mission to cure all disease requires thinking in terms of 10x breakthroughs rather than incremental improvements. X: https://x.com/pushmeet X: https://x.com/pushmeet LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pushmeet-kohli-4838994/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pushmeet-kohli-4838994/ Biohub: https://biohub.org/team/salvatore-candido/ Biohub:…