I wish he'd stop saying they solved the protein folding problem. They didn't. They made a step increase in the quality of protein structure prediction. That's a different (and simpler) problem. It's still a significant result, but nothing in AlphaFold tells us "why" (in a physics sense) a specific amino acid sequence adopts its final folded conformation, nor does it say anything about what the protein is doing once it reaches the final folded conformation.
I wish he'd stop saying they solved the protein folding problem. They didn't. They made a step increase in the quality of protein structure prediction. That's a different (and simpler) problem. It's still a significant result, but nothing in AlphaFold tells us "why" (in a physics sense) a specific amino acid sequence adopts its final folded conformation, nor does it say anything about what the protein is doing once it reaches the final folded conformation.