Google spent much of the past year hustling to build its Gemini chatbot to counter ChatGPT, pitching it as a multifunctional AI assistant that can help with work tasks or the digital chores of personal life. More quietly, the company has been working to enhance a more specialized artificial intelligence tool that is already a must-have for some scientists. AlphaFold, software developed by Google's DeepMind AI unit to predict the 3D structure of proteins, has received a significant upgrade. It can now model other molecules of biological importance, including DNA, and the interactions between antibodies produced by the immune system and the molecules of disease organisms. DeepMind added those new capabilities to AlphaFold 3 in part through borrowing techniques from AI image generators. 'This is a big advance for us,' Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, told WIRED ahead of Wednesday's publication of a paper on AlphaFold 3 in the science journal Nature. 'This is exactly what you...
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