Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-06-22 · 53 min
This episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at folding stalled biology for fifty years. A sequence of amino acids dictates a three-dimensional shape, but reading that shape meant a year and roughly $100,000 of crystallography per structure. Then AlphaFold 2 won CASP14 so decisively the organizers called the problem essentially solved.In this documentary cut, John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and has since left DeepMind for Anthropic, walks Tim Scarfe through what the system did and, more interestingly, what it did not. The architecture gets a proper dissection: MSAs, the Evoformer, invariant point attention, the FAPE loss, and Jumper's correction of the equivariance story, which ablations valued at roughly 2.5 of 30 GDT points rather than the whole win. He is blunt about the limits.
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