ML Folding Models Only Possess Localized Understanding of Physics
Jeremy Wohlwend · 🔬Generating Molecules, Not Just Models · Feb 12, 2026 · at 19:32
Jeremy Wohlwend, co-founder of Boltz, discusses whether AI structure prediction models genuinely learn physics principles or rely on evolutionary hints to narrow the energy landscape search space.
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“I think one of the thing, at least I believe is that once you're in that sort of approximate, you know, area of the solution space, then the models have like some understanding, you know, of how to get you to like, you know, the low energy low energy state. And so maybe you have some light understanding of physics, but maybe not quite enough, you know, to, Know how to like navigate the whole space well. So we need to give it these hints to kind of get there.”
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