In this special live recording from our Lexington AI Meetup, we sit down with Steve Crossan, a founding member of Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold team and former Google product leader. Steve helped launch groundbreaking AI research as part of the team that built AlphaFold, the model that cracked one of biology’s grand challenges.

AlphaFold can predict a protein’s 3D structure using only its amino acid sequence - a task that once took scientists months or years now completed in minutes. With the release of AlphaFold 3, the model now maps not just proteins, but how they interact with DNA, RNA, drugs, and antibodies - a huge leap for drug discovery and synthetic biology.

Steve breaks down the origin story of AlphaFold, the future of AI-powered science, and what’s next for healthcare, drug development, and beyond.

A special thank you to Brent Seales and Randall Stevens for helping us coordinate Steve's talk during his visit in Lexington!

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🎙 Hosted by Logan Jones & Evan Knowles

00:00 – Welcome & meetup context

04:15 – Steve’s journey from Google to DeepMind & AlphaFold birth

15:24 – Hackathon origin story & early experiments

20:10 – Accuracy breakthroughs & “contact distance” insight

25:48 – AlphaFold 3, docking, and drug-design potential

30:30 – Preventative medicine & the doctor-in-your-pocket vision

39:00 – Democratizing AI: open source and startup opportunities

51:25 – Audience Q&A on data bottlenecks & engineering culture

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