This seems strange to me. The entire point of these types of models is to predict things on unseen data. Are you saying Deepmind is completely lying about their model?
Deepmind solved CASP, isn't the entire point of that competition to predict unseen structures?
If AlphaFold doesn't predict anything then what are you using it to do?
So does every structural prediction method.
> if you give it a brand new fold with no relation to other folds, it cannot predict it
That will depend on the number of effective sequences, not the actual fold.
> I work in organisms that have virtually 0 sequence identity.
Then the problem is low sequence coverage, not the protein fold. On a side note, there are sensitive homology search protocols that rely very little on actual sequence identity.
DM is probably hyping it up and you are most likely hyping up your own criticism. It's a great symbiotic relationship outwardly presented as opposition.