> Why did they open source it? Wouldn’t this model be very valuable to the pharma industry?

This is a question we should remember when we feel like condemning big corporations for monopolizing AI. HuggingFace lists 12,257 models in its zoo, many coming from FAANG. You can start one in 3 lines of Python, or fine-tune it with a little more effort.

It is written in the article. A few reasons could be pressure from the publishing magazine, emerging open source implementations of the same idea, and the fact that this is still far from easy to comercialize.

As an outsider it seems Google has a much more academia friendly culture than other megacap tech companies. Guessing the talent which this culture draws are likely more adamant about their work being open sourced.

Because the core competency is not the model or code, but the people and organization that enable this project (and perhaps computing infrastructure as well?). The pharma industry will try to catch up of course, but they will also likely try to establish collaboration with DeepMind. This could be a good first step for Google into the medical/pharma business.

If I were to speculate:

1. It is inline with their vision/mission of the organization, advancing science. 2. Differentiate themselves from OpenAI, which despite the name, is not really big on open source.