While AI might scare many of us, the latest AI innovations are actually more likely to save lives than take jobs.
AlphaFold 3, a new medical AI from Google, could radically speed up the discovery of life-saving medicine.
In an Auckland University biology lab, artificial intelligence works side by side with the human variety.
"AlphaFold has certainly changed the academic field we work in, and so the first thing you do now is you use AlphaFold," Associate Professor Shaun Lott told Newshub.
AlphaFold, Google's latest medical AI, uses the same kind of tech as ChatGPT to map the structure of essentially all proteins - the fundamental building blocks of life, solving a decades-old problem for biologists like Prof Lott trying to make new medicines.
"So it's a long-standing problem. People have called it the holy grail of computational structural biology," he said.
"And it's complicated because proteins are extremely complex structural machines. They're basically too complicated. There's too many possibilities.
"It just worked incredibly well, probably far better than anyone imagined it might, to predict the folded structures."
A 3D recreation of a virus replicating is the kind of work AlphaFold enables. It uses a combination of AlphaFold and the video game graphics software, Unreal Engine.
AlphaFold's latest version, released only days ago, could save scientists years of work in discovering new life-saving drugs to combat viruses.
"So the new version of AlphaFold, AlphaFold 3, not only makes predictions of the structure of the proteins but also predicts what they can bind to," Prof Lott said.
"It will really help us go quicker in the discovery phase of drug discovery to find new molecules that might be the drugs of tomorrow."
But AlphaFold is just getting started.
"It's very fast," Prof Lott said.
"I just finished marking test questions from my third-year students, asking them about the things that AlphaFold 2 can't do, and the ink was just about drying on those answers when 3 has come along and is doing the things that we just learned it can't do."
And the AI train isn't slowing down - on Tuesday morning, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will unveil the latest iteration of ChatGPT, pushing us further into the future, before most of us have come to grips with our present.
