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> As a side note, the first author on this paper is the CEO of InstaDeep. I see it as a red flag that the CEO of a 150+ person company would put themselves as first author on this paper. Perhaps I'm unfairly judging and the CEO really was the lead contributor to the study.

Authors on scientific papers are ordered by name, so whoever's name is first is pure coincidence.

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The order of authors varies by field. I believe in biology it usually starts with the person who did most of the work (or people, but if more than one it's explicitly noted), everyone who contributed in the middle, principal investigator (i.e. head of lab) last.

In this case I notice that they first sorted all the instadeep people to the front, and biontech people to the end... not sure what I'm supposed to take away from the ordering, but it's not random.

Or sometimes PI first, depending on the scope of the PI's ego

It is not random. InstaDeep has designed, developed, built, benchmarked the method. BioNTech performed experimental validation, provided expert insight into the problem domain. Hence, authors are segmented by contribution areas.

This isn't true for the field of biology or medicine. If you take a look at the order of authors on the paper in question you can also see that the ordering is not alphabetical.

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