[mbgerring]

Press releases like this are published for the purposes of securing funding. Medical research departments at universities are currently under siege by the federal government. Emphasizing the use of AI is a great way to avoid Elon Musk's search, replace and destroy operation for research funding.

[avogt27]

I agree that this is probably at least partially a motivation, but it seems like a losing strategy to me. AlphaFold is run by a private company, and falsely elevating the importance of its use in the paper could be used to fuel the argument that all this research needs to be privatized. Given the current situation, I hope people realize that the breakthrough in structure prediction is literally impossible without 70+ years data generated by publicly funded research. Most of the foundational work in deep learning guided structure prediction was also publicly funded, with Deep Mind getting in at the tail end of the race once it seemed like the problem could be brute forced by throwing enough resources at it.