AI capability value concentrates in domains with a well-defined, verifiable objective and an enormous but searchable space — AlphaFold reached 90% accuracy on protein folding (10^35 combinations), computed 200M folds, and released them for free, whereas open-ended chat interfaces rely on the same model class but lack a ground-truth scoring function.
It suggests the leverage point for engineers is not model scale but problem framing: choosing tasks where correctness is mechanically checkable produces defensible, reusable artifacts (datasets, folds, benchmarks) instead of demos. This reframes where to spend prototyping budget.
Prefer constructing agent tasks with machine-verifiable reward (tests, compilers, formal checks, retrieval ground truth) over tasks evaluated by human-perceived fluency; verifiable domains produce compounding data assets.
Protein folding is one of biology's most complex challenges, with 10^35 possible combinations.
AlphaFold achieved 90% accuracy by 2020, computing 200 million protein folds and publishing them for free.