Is AlphaFold a scientific theory?

Dwarkesh Patel asks:

A deeper question about AlphaFold: in what sense is it even a scientific explanation at all? It’s not going to have some crazy unforeseen predictive power outside of protein folding, such as say, relativity had on Mercury’s precession.

There’s a couple of ways you can interpret this:

1. it’s not an explanation at all,
2. it contains little explanations you can extract through interpretability (Magnus Carlsen appears to have changed his game after AlphaZero forensics were published), or
3. it’s a genuinely new type of scientific object we don’t have the verbs for yet.

Science is not explanations.

Science is a theory which predicts things. Theory = model.

AlphaFold has predictive power. It is not interpretable, it is not a law — it is a statistical model.