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Comment by mupuff1234 | Hacker News Reader

Does Deepmind sell anything? Their site has no mention of any type of offering.

They have spun out a drug design company named Isomorphic Labs. [1]

amusingly, I work for a pharma and they don't even return our calls. I wonder how seriously they take this business, because if I was selling a product based on this, pharma would be my first customer.

Must have taken the Google approach and already terminated the product. /s

Could be wrong but I think Deepmind sees more value in elite AI/ML talent that Alphafold will draw and help retain than future potential profits on drug discovery. Open sourcing Alphafold and removing commercial restrictions wouldn't make much sense if drug profits were their goal.

No, isomorphic labs was set up to specifically commercialize this. If their goal is to be a discovery company, they are fairly naive.

Yeah I know about Isomorphic labs. My point is that talent Alphafold will draw is more valuable than potential drug discovery profits.

Where does the value come in if you pay them lots of money to work on unprofitable things? Just by virtue of not letting your competitors hire them?

Profit is later. I strongly believe this take.

https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1502775288257601540

If the promise of in silico drug design comes to fruition, the potential drug discovery profits could very well rival Google's ad profits.

Sure. AlphaFold is, in fact, the greatest shot at revenue that DeepMind has shown so far (and they are under intense pressure from Alphabet to show revenue).

I don't think there is any pressure on that front. They are supposedly profitable now (though i'm guessing this is partially accounting tricks) but there just isn't a need to be profitable. Search and Youtube print money to fund their R&D ($31B last year alone). The goal is AGI or close to it.

https://venturebeat.com/2021/10/10/ai-lab-deepmind-becomes-p...

The "profit" you're pointing at is money that Google pays DeepMind to do software and machine learning as a service for them. This pays off, for example with Jax, where nobody in Google Research could touch it because Jeff Dean/Tensorflow, until DM demonstrated (with alphafold) that Jax could do nobel-prize-winning research, to the point where Jeff has admitted that tensorflow has serious problems and systems like jax are the future (see the palm paper!!!)

Alphafold was released, the code is open source and the pretrained weights are available for free.

I believe only for academic use though right? I don't know if it can be used for commercial use.

incorrect, they modified the license so it can be used for commercial use - https://github.com/deepmind/alphafold/commit/8173117130e6df8...

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