Comment by bawolff

I'm assuming "de novo" means from first principles?

i really don't think anyone is presenting alphafold as if its a physics simulator operating from first principles.

Like obviously alphafold does not "understand". Maybe i have blinders on for being in the computer field, but i would assume that it goes without saying that a statistical deep learning AI model does not tell us how to solve the problem from first principles.

Like yes, alphafold isn't the final chapter in protein folding and that is obvious. But it seems a stretch to dismiss it on those grounds. If that's the metric we're going with then we can dismiss pretty much everything that has happened in science for the past thousand years.

> re self driving car metaphor

I think this is a bad metaphor for your purposes, because self-driving cars aren't de novo understanding, and arguably do have some carry over from things like adaptive cruise control.