[jrflo]

> DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions.

Is this existing database enough for researchers?

[spwa4]

AlphaFold 1 and 2 are open, and freely licensed, weights, and they're still online and downloadable. Alphafold 3 is open weight.

I'm guessing Google can't make money on them.

You can do more with the weights than just the protein structures. You can design new proteins. So no, the database is not enough. But the weights and a university cluster are enough.

[flopsamjetsam]

> I'm guessing Google can't make money on them.

The weights are free for non-commercial use. And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies.

Edit: after reading the article, I realise it's about the disbanding of the team, so probably your original comment is correct.

[spwa4]

> The weights are free for non-commercial use.

Nope. Alphafold 1 & 2 can be used for whatever you want. Also this has resulted in them being used to train better models than Alphafold 3.

> And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies.

Yep. And given how Pharma works, being the "descendants" of Nobel-prize winning research I'm sad to say this will probably work and pay pretty well (not by Google standards, but by anyone else's standard, pretty well), despite the fact that there are better models.