4 korrents from this piece
Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.
Their wordsI predict (with confidence bordering on arrogance) that whatever machine-learning progress can be made will correlate extremely closely with the quality of the data around any given problem
Their wordsMost proteins are essentially unannotated, with their functions completely or mostly unknown.
Their wordsThe "unknown unknown" problem makes hash (in retrospect) of many attempts at biological theorizing and modeling, and I think that this problem will still accrue to ML models until we know an awful lot more.
Their wordsSo for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon.