Even though AI can predict protein structures instantly now, human scientists are still doing slow, pricey experiments at the same old rate.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
How Artificial Intelligence Shapes Science: Evidence from AlphaFold
SSRN · 6395041
The Takeaway
AlphaFold was hailed as the 'solution' to a 50-year-old biology problem that would render physical experiments obsolete. Instead, researchers are using the AI to find even more things to test manually, proving that 'solving' a task with AI doesn't necessarily reduce the amount of human labor in a field.
From the abstract
We study how a frontier AI model affects scientific discovery by examining the release of the AlphaFold2 algorithm and the impact it had on structural biology and related fields of science. Structural biology is the field of science concerned with understanding the structure and function of proteins, and researchers in this field historically devoted substantial time and resources to experimentally solving three-dimensional protein structures. AlphaFold has the ability to predict these structure