Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

DeepMind folded all known proteins; 1.7 million researchers use the database

Shane Legg · AI is smarter than you think with Shane Legg of Google DeepMind · Apr 11, 2024 · at 16:28

Shane Legg, co-founder of Google DeepMind, discusses the public release and scientific impact of AlphaFold's protein database.

0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.2s

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“What we did is we folded all the proteins known to science, and we released them all to the public for free, so you can find them all online on the internet, and you can look at the shapes and so on, and we've had about 1.7 million researchers use that resource.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

DeepMind folded all proteins known to science, released them publicly for free, and about 1.7 million researchers have used the database.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

All three components of the statement are substantiated by public records. First, in July 2022, Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI expanded the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database to over 200 million predicted protein structures (later documented at over 214 million in Nucleic Acids Research), covering essentially all cataloged proteins known to science in UniProt. Second, the entire database was made publicly and freely accessible under an open Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. Third, official EMBL metrics published on March 12, 2024 (prior to the April 11, 2024 podcast release) confirmed that over 1.7 million researchers across 190 countries had used the database.

On July 28, 2022, Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI expanded the AlphaFold DB to over 200 million predicted protein structures, covering nearly all cataloged proteins known to science.
AlphaFold DB was made freely accessible to the global scientific community under an open-access CC-BY 4.0 license.
An official EMBL publication on March 12, 2024 confirmed that the AlphaFold Database had surpassed 1.7 million users across 190 countries.

Checked against

[1] embl-em.de [2] deepmind.google [3] nih.gov [4] nih.gov [5] deepmind.google [6] nih.gov [7] embl.org [8] undark.org

"1.7 million" researchers OR users "AlphaFold" AlphaFold 1.7 million researchers database DeepMind EMBL 2024 OR 2023 AlphaFold database 200 million proteins EMBL EBI July 2022 "1.4 million" OR "1.7 million" "AlphaFold" DeepMind 2023 OR 2024 "1.6 million" OR "1.7 million" OR "1.8 million" "AlphaFold" "researchers"

assessed as of 2026-09-03

This assessment is an AI reading of a public statement, made against the cited references with the confidence shown. It can be wrong. The quote, the tape and the references are all on this page; if something is off, use report an error below. full disclaimer →

Mentioned

AlphaFold database DeepMind

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