DNA, mRNA, proteins, AI. I spent the last year going deep into computational biology as an ML engineer. This is Part I of what I found. π§¬
In 2024, AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
By 2026, the open-source community had built alternatives that outperform it.
That's the story I find most interesting about protein AI right now. Not just the science (which is incredible), but the speed at which open-source caught up. Multiple teams, independently, reproduced and then exceeded AlphaFold 3's accuracy with permissive licenses. The field went from prediction to generation: we're not just modeling known proteins anymore, we're designing new ones.
I spent months mapping this landscape for ML engineers. What the architectures actually are (spoiler: transformers and diffusion models), which tools to use for what, and which ones you can actually ship commercially.
Interesting, looks like it's somewhere in the middle. The refusal rates would be nice to have compared as well to get the refusals / performance ratio marked