alt Hacker NewsYes I do agree that much of the work was done using conventional methods and quite little was done with AI. AI model did do the folding though which was IMO critical to understand the structure and see the secondary substructure.
The title is clickbaity, it would be useful to stress that AI solves a very specific problem here that is extremely hard to do otherwise. It is like a lego piece.
Several crystal structures of the catalytic domain of the protein had already been determined. The DNA binding domain of the protein which AlphaFold predicted is a relatively common fold that probably could have been figured out using homology modeling, which was common 10+ years ago. Even the small molecule docking used pretty old school computational techniques, and all but one drug interacted with the predetermined structures. The analysis was indeed aided by AI in the form of AlphaFold, but my guess is it sped a couple things up rather than making them possible.