In late November, 2020 it becamse known that Google owned DeepMind developed a piece of AI software called "AlphaFold" that can accurately predict the structure that proteins will fold into in a matter of days. It was supposed to put DeepMind back on the AI map.

For decades, researchers had tried to develop software that can take a sequence of amino acids and accurately predict the structure it will form. Despite this being a matter of chemistry and thermodynamics, we've only had limited success—until last year.

Now researchers claim to have leapfrogged DeepMind the way DeepMind leapfrogged the rest of the world, with RoseTTAFold, a system that does nearly the same thing at a fraction of the computational cost that's open-source, and free to use. It's quite a blow for Google's ambitions for DeepMind to be profitable.

The open-source nature of the tools means that the scientific community should be able to build on the advances to create even more powerful and useful software, says Jinbo Xu, a computational biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in either effort.

While BigTech companies like Google seek to monopolize the best AI for their own highly questionable profitability business models, AI researchers and academics are trying to democratize AI advances in a more equitable way.

AlphaFold2 was one of those flashy headlines out of DeepMind, the cash bleeding AI research firm under Alphabet's expensive roster. It had been the talk of the industry since November, when it blew away the competition at CASP14, a virtual competition between algorithms built to predict the physical structure of a protein given the sequence of amino acids that make it up.

RoseTTAFold may actually be now superior to AlphaFold2. DeepMind — which has a reputation for being cagey about its work — described AlphaFold 2 in a brief presentation at CASP on 1 December. RoseTTaFold, performs as well as AlphaFold 2, and is described in a Science paper also published on 15 July. The open-source nature of the tools means that the scientific community should be able to build on the advances to create even more powerful and useful software.

 Researchers had been working on this challenge for decades. If AI is to be used for good, it has to be open-source and to help democratize knowledge to make the world a better place. Google's efforts in AI could truly spark a breakthrough as quantum computing evolves. However if they turn that advantage for profit and not for good, it could become quite dangerous.

While DeepMind clearly has a lot of global talent in AI, it already has incredible profits from its Ad business, it should leverage AI for good. RoseTTAFold will keep Google' honest with AlphaFold2. That might be easier said than done as people continue to leave Google or get fired from it, which underlines important problems in its leadership, business model and both its business ethics and AI ethics.

DeepMind's future remains highly uncertain even its Google overlords try to squeeze more profitability, utility and efficacy out of it while footing a gigantic bill each year. This comes as OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik's Cube. 

Google is often heralded as untouchable in its first-mover advantage in AI, but DeepMind's evolution has been anything but smooth and appears to be losing credibility. DeepMind heralds AI as part of humanity's hope, while Google's CEO equates AI to the invention of fire, but Google's ability and application of AI is getting a bit suspect.