AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology
IMO, AlphaFold 2 is a great example of industrial research labs making huge breakthroughs. I'm not sure if AlphaFold 2 is over hyped or not (because I don't know anything about protein folding), but given how a lot of computational biologists reacted to the results (the co-founder of CASP seems very impressed :')), I suppose this a big deal. I hope DeepMind becomes the Bell Labs for AI. Bell Labs is the best example of industrial research labs making huge strides. Of course, AI doesn't exist yet, and deep "learning" is nothing but curve-fitting done in fancy ways, but I would not be surprised if DeepMind results in a few Turing and Nobel laureates.