This is a strange take because this is consistent with what Google has been doing for a decade with AI. AlphaGo never had the weights released. Nor has any successor (not muzero, the StarCraft one, the protein folding alphafold, nor any other that could reasonably be claimed to be in the series afaik)

You can state as a philosophical ideal that you prefer open source or open weights, but that's not something deepmind has prioritized ever.

I think it's worth discussing:

* What are the advantages or disadvantages of bestowing a select few with access?

* What about having an API that can be called by anyone (although they may ban you)?

* Vs finally releasing the weights

But I think "behind locked down API where they can monitor usage" makes sense from many perspectives. It gives them more insight into how people use it (are there things people want to do that it fails at?), and it potentially gives them additional training data

For AlphaFold3 (vs. AlphaFold2 which was 100% public), they released the weights if you are an affiliate with an academic institution. I hope they do the same with AlphaGenome. I don't even care about the commercial reasons or licensing fees, it's more of a practical reason that every research institution will have an HPC cluster which is already configured to run deep learning stuff can run these jobs faster than the Google API.

And if they don't, I'm not sure how this will gain adoption. There are tons of well-maintained and established workflows out there in the cloud and on-prem that do all of these things AlphaGenome claim to do very well - many that Google promotes on their own platform (e.g., GATK on GCP).

(People in tech think people in science are like people in tech just jump on the latest fads from BigTech marketing - when it's quite opposite it's all about whether your results/methods will please the reviewers in your niche community)

> The model source code and weights will also be provided upon final publication.

Page 59 from the preprint[1]

Seems like they do intend to publish the weights actually

[1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/papers/alphage...

> Once the model is fully released, scientists will be able to adapt and fine-tune it on their own datasets to better tackle their unique research questions.

This is in the press release, so they are going to release the weights.

EDIT: I should have read the paper more thoroughly and been more kind. On page 59, they mention there will be a source and code release. Thank you Deepmind :)

The bean counters rule. There is no corporate vision, no long-term plan. The numbers for the next quarter are driving everything.