3 ms·

Why did they open source it? Wouldn’t this model be very valuable to the pharma industry?

gostsamo 5y ago
It is written in the article. A few reasons could be pressure from the publishing magazine, emerging open source implementations of the same idea, and the fact that this is still far from easy to comercialize.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Don't forget internal pressure. A lot of people will say "Unless you opensource my work and that of my colleagues, I quit". When faced with all your best people threatening to quit, you might just opensource that work. It turns out you still have an advantage by being ~1 year ahead on applying it to anything, and having all the people who know how it works on your staff.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  Another reason could be that whoever wants to run it will very likely run it in the cloud, and there's a chance they'd run it in the Google Cloud. A machine similar to the one they mention on the alphafold github page (12 vCPU, 1 GPU, 85 GB) costs you between $1 and $4/hour.
visarga 5y ago
> Why did they open source it? Wouldn’t this model be very valuable to the pharma industry? This is a question we should remember when we feel like condemning big corporations for monopolizing AI. HuggingFace lists 12,257 models in its zoo, many coming from FAANG. You can start one in 3 lines of Python, or fine-tune it with a little more effort.
alphabetting 5y ago
As an outsider it seems Google has a much more academia friendly culture than other megacap tech companies. Guessing the talent which this culture draws are likely more adamant about their work being open sourced.
summerlight 5y ago
Because the core competency is not the model or code, but the people and organization that enable this project (and perhaps computing infrastructure as well?). The pharma industry will try to catch up of course, but they will also likely try to establish collaboration with DeepMind. This could be a good first step for Google into the medical/pharma business.
swayson 5y ago
If I were to speculate: 1. It is inline with their vision/mission of the organization, advancing science. 2. Differentiate themselves from OpenAI, which despite the name, is not really big on open source.

It is written in the article. A few reasons could be pressure from the publishing magazine, emerging open source implementations of the same idea, and the fact that this is still far from easy to comercialize.

londons_explore 5y ago
Don't forget internal pressure. A lot of people will say "Unless you opensource my work and that of my colleagues, I quit". When faced with all your best people threatening to quit, you might just opensource that work. It turns out you still have an advantage by being ~1 year ahead on applying it to anything, and having all the people who know how it works on your staff.
credit_guy 5y ago
Another reason could be that whoever wants to run it will very likely run it in the cloud, and there's a chance they'd run it in the Google Cloud. A machine similar to the one they mention on the alphafold github page (12 vCPU, 1 GPU, 85 GB) costs you between $1 and $4/hour.

visarga 5y ago

> Why did they open source it? Wouldn’t this model be very valuable to the pharma industry? This is a question we should remember when we feel like condemning big corporations for monopolizing AI. HuggingFace lists 12,257 models in its zoo, many coming from FAANG. You can start one in 3 lines of Python, or fine-tune it with a little more effort.

alphabetting 5y ago

As an outsider it seems Google has a much more academia friendly culture than other megacap tech companies. Guessing the talent which this culture draws are likely more adamant about their work being open sourced.

summerlight 5y ago

Because the core competency is not the model or code, but the people and organization that enable this project (and perhaps computing infrastructure as well?). The pharma industry will try to catch up of course, but they will also likely try to establish collaboration with DeepMind. This could be a good first step for Google into the medical/pharma business.

swayson 5y ago

If I were to speculate: 1. It is inline with their vision/mission of the organization, advancing science. 2. Differentiate themselves from OpenAI, which despite the name, is not really big on open source.