Why aren't there more AlphaFolds?

This essay began as a talk at the 2026 Gold Lab Symposium. You can watch the talk itself here. The content is the same, but I've expanded on it more here.The universe doesn't give up its secrets easily. Every time we learn some truth, we depend on prior, equally hard-won knowledge, and usually some luck. The easy truths are getting rarer, so the excitement around speeding up science with deep learning models is understandable, especially after LLMs surprised us by learning so much just from pred...