Instead, the acceleration of science will come about thanks to another approach: AI agents. The primary condition for AlphaFold’s success was the existence of the Protein Data Bank, a data set of roughly 170,000 experimentally validated protein structures on which DeepMind’s team could train its model. The creation of the Protein Data Bank was not simple: It took 53 years of international scientific cooperation and, by a recent estimate, roughly $21 billion worth of experimental work to assemble. In the case of protein structures, the key experimental technique—protein crystallography—is an unusually replicable and dependable tool, so much so that over 25 Nobel Prizes have relied on it. Simply put, an agent is an AI reasoning engine that has been given access to tools—digital or physical—and the capabilities to use them.