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AlphaFold3 – why did Nature publish it without its code?

Criticism of our decision to publish AlphaFold3 raises important questions. We welcome readers’ views.

The latest iteration of the protein-structure-prediction algorithm AlphaFold has generated a great deal of interest since its release, accompanied by a paper in Nature, earlier this month 1. Shortly after it was published, DeepMind’s vice-president of research, Pushmeet Kohli, posted on the social-media platform X that the team is “working on releasing the AF3 model (incl weights) for academic use” within six months. Reasons for restrictions include a lack of discipline-wide data-reporting standards or of the technological infrastructure necessary for depositing data openly and in structured repositories.

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