Meet an AI Boundary Breaker

A billion people at risk from a parasitic disease.?

400 million tonnes of annual plastic waste.?

Over 600 muscles in a human body.?

All connected by a single, five-decade-long mystery: proteins. And how they fold.?

Proteins are the zeroes and ones in the biological software that runs our bodies. They are involved in everything from making our minds wonder to making our bodies wander. From enabling synaptic connections in our brains to generating antibodies that fight diseases.? At the heart of how proteins function is how they fold – but that had been a 50-year howdunnit.?

AlphaFold: Gate to a Goldmine?

Until AlphaFold, the Google DeepMind AI data detective.?

Till 2020, we knew the structures of only 17% of the 100,000+ proteins present in our bodies. AlphaFold pored over existing datasets to crack the code – and predicted over 200 million of them in mere months. It revealed not just 98.5% of human proteins, but literally the entire protein universe on this earth. Yeast, bacteria, fruit flies, rats. Fish, plants.?

A process that would have otherwise taken humans – hold your breath – one billion years of research.

A method that revamped the game. As one scientist put it, researching protein structures used to be like searching for one gold nugget at a time. Alpha Fold unlocked the gates to a goldmine.?

And a tech leap that won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.?

Teaching the machine

One of Time’s ‘100 Most Influential People in AI 2023’, Pushmeet Kohli grew up in Dehradun, an idyllic hill station in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand. His ambition was to become a teacher. And at Microsoft, and then at Google DeepMind, his wish came true. Only instead of humans, he’s been teaching the machines. To do human tasks.

And Kohli has faith in his students. Nature, he believes, is not something humans can control, and we have limited understanding of how it works. Which is why he feels that AI is the most powerful tool our species has – because it will help turbocharge science. Towards next-gen diagnosis and therapeutics.?

The manifold uses of AlphaFold?

AlphaFold is making this happen. It’s figuring out the structure of proteins that will enhance our understanding of how they work. How they interact with each other, with drugs, viruses. And any misfolds and missteps: which can cause allergies. Weakened immune systems. Diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s.

In fact, Google DeepMind is building a version of AlphaFold that can predict whether you’re likely to develop a rare disease. Like premature aging.?

Incredibly, AlphaFold isn’t just advancing work on human bodies.?

It’s developing enzymes that can eat plastic. Cue – finally – a cleaner world. It’s solving honey bee extinction and correcting our food chains.?

The AI tool is faster, cheaper, more accurate. It’s been published as an open-source software – unusual for anything coming out of Big Tech – and so far, 1.7 million researchers in 190 countries have made use of it. And Kohli believes that it’s just getting started.?

At SYNAPSE 2024, we sought to sift AI hope from AI hype. At SYNAPSE 2025, Pushmeet Kohli will present an AI application in action – the most ambitious and successful yet: the marvel that is AlphaFold. How it’s transforming everything from healthcare to climate change. Next steps. And how it could even help us trace our evolution across millions of years.?

Written by: Atharva Pandit, Ritika Passi