Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has released a tool that uses artificial intelligence to predict the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins, competing with similar technology from Google parent Alphabet, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Experts told the newspaper the AI platform could lead to advances in medicine, such as the discovery of new drugs.
Meta AI's ESMFold system built a public database that can predict 617 million proteins, which are known as the "building blocks of life," according to the March 16 story. AlphaFold from Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind Technologies, by comparison, has predicted 214 million proteins. While ESMFold is faster, AlphaFold is more accurate.
Meta made the predictions with the help of large language models, the same technology used for ChatGPT, the Journal reported.