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This is from late 2020… weirdly, nothing seems to have come of it.

Is there an update since then? Have they actually done anything useful with it?

According to the AlphaFold Wikipedia article:

> As of 18 June 2021, according to DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis a full methods paper to describe AlphaFold 2 had been written up and was undergoing peer review prior to publication, which would be accompanied by open source code and "broad free access to AlphaFold for the scientific community"

which is basically admission that they will API it, not release the models... again.

The original version on github can only compute the specific systems in the paper.

https://github.com/deepmind/deepmind-research/tree/master/al...

I don't know why scientific publications keep doing PR work for them.

if cryptography is a weapon, isn't folding proteins also arguably a weapon?

Yes, but only because if cryptography is a weapon then everything is a weapon.

As the article says

> The details of how AlphaFold 2 works are still unknown, and we may not have full access to them until their paper is peer-reviewed (which may take more than a year, based on their CASP13 paper).

So it's not particularly surprising that we haven't heard much yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com