The law of conservation of data

We’ve had a good amount of recent news about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in chemistry (and biology), and the pace is not slowing down. Late in 2020, the Deepmind–AlphaFold team made headlines with a huge improvement in the prediction of protein structures, followed up quickly by the RosettaFold team from the University of Washington, US. Now both groups have announced similarly impressive progress in predicting protein–protein interactions and the structures of the resulting complexes, problems seen by many as the logical next (and harder) steps in the field.