Did AlphaFold Solve Protein Folding?

Pushmeet Kohli says the protein folding problem has been solved only at a conceptual level. There have been some advances, and a protein's shape might change depending on the context. Science operates by isolating one thing and then making progress step by step.

Proteins are not blocks, and they do not act as blocks. He says he calls proteins the building blocks all the time, and he does not believe it. Proteins are extremely complex and disordered. He and John Jumper used to ask what they were trying to solve. The true ground state proteins take is unknown, and so is the actual distribution of structure proteins take.

What the work did was take a structure someone deposited in the PDB and replicate it until the result was the same structure. That turned out to be useful. It does not mean protein dynamics are understood.