Their PR strategy is to take problems people thought were impossible to solve in the next 10 years, and solve them (Go) or nearly solve them (StarCraft 2, protein solving)
No one thought that Go was impossible except people who weren't involved in engineering/software and shouldn't have been taken seriously in the first place.
Superhuman game AI has existed for decades. It's entirely unsurprising that one can play a strategy game, and no one thought it wasn't possible.
I'll send you $500 USD if AlphaFold derivatives lead to a single new therapy or drug that helps real patients in the next 5 years.
'In the next 10 years' is the key phrase here. Everyone watching Go (I looked at the problem 15-ish years ago) thought it required a massive advance to beat the best humans. DeepMind made that advance.
'bah, whatever, both Newton and Leibniz were hacks. Everyone knew calculus would have been invented anyway. It's basically a consequence of some stuff Archimedes did.'
DM didn't "solve" anything around proteins. They just made an improvement to existing homology modelling methods. If you look, the system is incredibly dependent on having large numbers of high quality sequence alignments to proteins with known structure and lots and lots of evolutionary data.
This was actually fairly obvious 20 years ago and it's been disappointing to me to see how long it took somebody to make this improvement, but really, it couldn't have been done without recent algorithmic improvements and huge amounts of CPU time.
