| I highlighted almost the exact quote you have here and it's nice to see it at the top of the discussion. I agree with your sentiment, but I also think it's worth thinking carefully about two of the main points that stuck out to me: - Access to compute for large models - Access to large datasets (in this case mostly taxpayer funded academic research) Every company and/or research group has access to the data, but some have a huge advantage in terms of compute. If there's a question about commercializing research, the scales are tilted toward those with more compute. In this specific case, I think the intention to make AlphaFold open source and available to the community is obviously the best solution. But my question is, what happens if a less altruistic for-profit entity uses its huge compute advantage to develop new techniques and insights, and then patents everything before it becomes available to the community? I understand that is the basic mechanism for how medical/pharmaceutical research gets translated into life-saving treatments, but if we're approaching a generalized model that can pump out "patent-worthy" discoveries only bound by the amount of data and access to compute, there's an obvious opportunity for a winner-take-most scenario. |