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Who will make AlphaFold3 open source? Scientists race to crack AI model
Researchers are aiming to create fully accessible versions of the latest iteration of DeepMind’s blockbuster protein-structure model.
“It would be bad if capabilities that are just so fundamental to our ability to do drug discovery and other things that are relevant for human health end up getting locked up,” says Mohammed AlQuraishi, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York City. “This does not align with the principles of scientific progress, which rely on the ability of the community to evaluate, use, and build upon existing work,” states an 11 May open letter to Nature co-written by Stephanie Wankowicz, a computational structural biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and nine other scientists, and which has since been signed by more than 600 researchers. But AlQuraishi expects that many pharmaceutical companies — which have access to troves of experimentally determined structures of proteins bound to possible drugs — will be keen to have a version of AlphaFold3 that they can retrain with their own proprietary data, which could boost the model’s performance.
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