I work in the field.
There are indeed many different applications of ML to drug discovery, but AlphaFold is a niche technique, and protein structure prediction is not practically useful, in general.
There are indeed many different applications of ML to drug discovery, but AlphaFold is a niche technique, and protein structure prediction is not practically useful, in general.
There are many areas where ML is being used to advance drug discovery and other kinds of practical, difficult biophysics problems. Casual readers would do well not to get too fixated on this particular area.