AlphaFold 2
DeepMind's protein structure prediction system that, in late 2020, solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology: given a protein's amino acid sequence, predict its 3D folded shape. The 2021 paper + open-source release made these predictions free for any researcher worldwide. Within 3 years, the AlphaFold Database contained predicted structures for nearly all 200 million known proteins.
How are Intelligence, Speed & Cost bucketed?
- Top 1%≤ 1%
- Top 5%≤ 5%
- Top 10%≤ 10%
- Good≤ 25%
- Medium≤ 50%
- Below avg> 50%
- Top 1%≥ 345 tok/s
- Top 5%≥ 237 tok/s
- Top 10%≥ 196 tok/s
- Good≥ 146 tok/s
- Medium≥ 90 tok/s
- Slow< 90 tok/s
- Freeopen weights · self-host
- Low< $1 / M out
- Moderate$1–5 / M out
- High≥ $5 / M out
Why it matters
AlphaFold proved that AI could not just match but transform a foundational scientific discipline. The Nobel Prize award in 2024 made the recognition official: this is a Nobel-class contribution to science, not just to AI.
Core Capabilities
Context Window
Context window not disclosed.
Availability
Pricing Model
Capability / Performance
Where this model sits relative to the middle 60% of models in the tree. All scores are 0–10 (higher is better).
What it feels like
- Solved a 50-year grand challenge in biology — protein structure prediction at experimental accuracy
- CASP14 median GDT score 92.4 vs prior best ~62 — the kind of step-change that ends a research subfield
- Predicted 200M+ protein structures in AlphaFold DB by 2022 — 1000x more than all experimental data combined
- Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — first AI work to do so
- Open-source code + structure database used by 2M+ researchers worldwide
- AlphaFold 3 (2024) extended this to protein-ligand and protein-DNA complexes
Best use cases
- Drug discovery and target validation pipelines
- Structural biology research where experimental crystallography is too slow / expensive
- Vaccine and antibody design starting from sequence
- Teaching how transformer-style attention generalises beyond language
Tools to try
Not ideal for
- Membrane proteins and intrinsically disordered regions (still imperfect)
- Direct use as a chemistry / docking model (AlphaFold 3 is more relevant for that)