Is the cost to train really the relevant metric for developing this? It seems like the salary's involved are probably at least 10x whatever they spent on hardware.
Yes, because they must release sufficient information for others to recreate the AI model, according to the rules of entering CASP.
> Did AlphaFold2 also have the biggest budget? :)
And then the parent
> Actually, no! Or at least, the budget they used (<$100k at retail prices to train the model) is well within the feasible range for other research institutions.
I'm not sure how the cost of replicating the model in the future is relevant in this context. We appear to be discussing the cost of developing this model from scratch, such as what it would have taken an alternate team to create and submit this if DeepMind never got involved.