An unlikely ally for open-source protein-folding models: Big Pharma

Drug companies are funding open-source AI to avoid depending on Google.

This post originally appeared in Understanding AI.

As AI reshapes biology, the fight is no longer just over accuracy — it’s over who gets to do science at all.

Protein-folding models are the success story in AI for science.

In the late 2010s, researchers from Google DeepMind used machine learning to predict the three-dimensional shape of proteins. AlphaFold 2, announced in 2020, was so good that its creators shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with an outside academic.

Yet many academics have had mixed feelings about DeepMind’s advances. In 2018, Mohammed AlQuraishi, then a research fellow at Harvard, wrote a widely read blog post reporting on a “broad sense of existential angst” among protein-folding researchers.