Right, I know I keep banging on about Deepmind & Alphafold, but something I (a) do for a living and (b) am knowledgable about, is finally in the news, so suck it up.

*deep breath*

It's not available to all - the toys/source are (to the best of my knowledge) not available to other researchers.

So it isn't actually advancing science (yet). To do that it needs to be open.

And it is built on open depositories of protein structures (PDB) and sequences (Uniprot or equivalent), and on academic pieces of software (HHblits is in the mix, for example, I believe)

To have a closed system built on an open system is heretical, to my mind. (Don't get me started about academic publishing)

Ultimately, it seems like they don't care about the biology. This is just a big, messy mathematical problem that they can turn some firepower on, and reap some PR wins. We've seen that with a slick PR campaign and fawning press coverage in 2018, and again in 2020.

If they cared about the biology, this would all be open-source, there'd be a server hooked up to a nice fat CPU/GPU farm (of which they have many), and we'd all be submitting our problem sequences for analysis. We can't.

TL;DR until it's open and available to all, it doesn't actually matter, or change anything.

When we can start prodding it and submitting our problems to it, only then will we truly determine the value of what they've done.