[someguy101010]

reposting this from youtube comment

From 1:14:55-1:15:20, within the span of 25 seconds, the way Demis spoke about releasing all known sequences without a shred of doubt was so amazing to see. There wasn't a single second where he worried about the business side of it (profits, earnings, shareholders, investors) —he just knew it had to be open source for the betterment of the world. Gave me goosebumps. I watched that on repeat for more than 10 times.

[dekhn]

Another way to interpret this (and I don't mean it pejoratively at all): Demis has been optimizing his chances for winning a nobel prize for quite some time now. Releasing the data increased that chance. He also would have been fairly certain that the commercial value of the predictions was fairly low (simply predicting structures accurately was never the rate-limiting step for downstream things like drug discovery). And that he and his team would have a commercial advantage by developing better proprietary models using them to make discoveries.

[tim333]

Also since selling Deepmind to Google, it's Google's shareholder's money really.

[sgt101]

I think that's a rather conspiratorial way of framing it.

I think it's more about someone trying to do the most good that was possible at that time.

I doubt he cares much about prizes or money at this point.

[mNovak]

My interpretation of that moment was that they had already decided to give away protein sequences as charity, it was just a decision of all as a bundle vs fielding individual requests (a 'service').

Still great of them to do, and as can be seen it's worth it as a marketing move.

[dekhn]

(as an aside, this is a common thing that comes up when you have a good model: do you make a server that allows people to do one-off or small-scale predictions, or do you take a whole query set and run it in batch and save the results in a database; this comes up a lot)

[jpecar]

DB of known proteins is not where the money can be made, designing new proteins is. This is why AlphaFold3 (that can aid in this) is now wrapped in layers of legalese preventing you to actually use it in the way you want. At least that's what my lifescience users tell me. Big Pharma is now paying Big Money to DeepMind to make use of AF3 ...

[potsandpans]

I also noticed this as well. Actually went back and watched it several times. It's an incredible moment. I keep thinking, "if this moment is real, this is truly a special person."