None of this is even remotely surprising to me; DeepMind (specifically Demis) and Nature have had a long-running mutually beneficial relationship. I guess the

None of this is even remotely surprising to me; DeepMind (specifically Demis) and Nature have had a long-running mutually beneficial relationship. I guess the way I think about it is, the absolutely most competitive people in a field don't actually need the exact code and data from their competitors- they have enough smart people on staff to reproduce and sometimes even exceed the competitor. That's certainly true for David Baker (Rosetta). It slows the process down, meaning Baker's group might need to spend 3-6 months reading through the paper, reproducing the ideas, seeing what works, what important details were left out (nearly every great paper I've read leaves out some bit of the special sauce), and then releasing their own papers/codes/results. It's worth seeing this with 200+ year old eyes, for example the competition between England and Germany to be the #1 science country, with massive benefits for not sharing the exact details of technology that was developed locally. One might even speculate that this sort of behavior does globally increase the overall rate of scientific progress by stimulating intense competition instead of complacency.