Hah; no. What we've been doing is a form of incremental improvement, taking existing proteins and modeling a single fold in an attempt to evolve a new one, gradually forcing the protein towards some desired property. We've been largely unable to design proteins from the ground up and have them actually work.

This thing just up and spat out thousands of functional proteins from scratch, which is unheard of. There are proteins solving the same problem with completely different structures. Just one of those novel, functioning proteins is the end goal of everything we've been trying to do for decades. This is pretty incredible.