What happened
On 8 May 2024, Nature published AlphaFold 3, a diffusion-based model that predicts the joint structure of biomolecular complexes across nearly all molecular types in the Protein Data Bank. The paper reported higher accuracy than specialized docking and nucleic-acid tools on several interaction classes, including protein–ligand and antibody–antigen cases relative to AlphaFold-Multimer v2.3. Google later released academic-use code and weights and a public AlphaFold Server. The result is a widely used research tool rather than an approved clinical product; several later open models (Chai-1, Boltz-1) independently targeted the same task.