From Undark, June 6:
The powerful AI-driven software from DeepMind was released without making its code openly available to scientists.
Imagine a world where in a matter of minutes, scientists could identify drugs to treat incurable diseases, design chemicals that could break down plastics to clean up pollution, and develop new materials that can suck excess carbon dioxide out of the air to help address climate change. This is the promise of new biology- and chemistry-based models that use artificial intelligence, or AI, to perform traditionally time-consuming tasks such as determining the structures of proteins.
Google DeepMind, a private research subsidiary of Google, released the highly anticipated AlphaFold 3 model last month as a paper in Nature. This model claims to be an improvement over its earlier version, AlphaFold 2, because it can predict not just protein structures, but also how they interact with RNA, DNA, and — most importantly — drugs. DeepMind said that it hopes AlphaFold 3 will “transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery.”
However, it’s unlikely to change how computer scientists such as myself understand biology anytime soon, because Nature, the highly competitive journal that states its mission is to “serve scientists,” allowed DeepMind to keep the software’s code unavailable, despite its own editorial policy requiring authors “to make materials, data, code, and associated protocols promptly available to readers without undue qualifications.”
In an interview with Nature reporter Ewen Callaway, DeepMind cited its own commercial interests as a reason to restrict access, in particular through its spinoff company Isomorphic Labs. “We have to strike a balance between making sure that this is accessible and has the impact in the scientific community as well as not compromising Isomorphic’s ability to pursue commercial drug discovery,” said Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s head of AI science and vice president of research.
Since DeepMind did produce the software, it’s understandable that the company should be the one to determine how AlphaFold 3 gets released. DeepMind will just have to pay the consequences that its software may not be as popular among researchers.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that more than 1.8 million people have used previous versions of AlphaFold, most notably AlphaFold 2, the earth-shatteringly powerful technology released by DeepMind in 2021. A large part of its popularity came because it was verified by hundreds of academic groups, for example during the CASP14 competition in 2020, a global challenge held every two years where teams make predictions on the structures of proteins that have never been seen before....
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