The Download: the future of AlphaFold, and chatbot privacy concerns

In 2017, fresh off a PhD on theoretical chemistry, John Jumper heard rumors that Google DeepMind had moved on from game-playing AI to a secret project to predict the structures of proteins. He applied for a job.

Just three years later, Jumper and CEO Demis Hassabis had led the development of an AI system called AlphaFold 2 that was able to predict the structures of proteins to within the width of an atom, matching lab-level accuracy, and doing it many times faster—returning results in hours instead of…