The Financial Times of the UK reported on August 7 that META has laid off a team that used AI to create the first database containing over 600 million protein structures, indicating that the company is abandoning pure scientific projects and shifting towards developing profitable AI products.
META previously employed about 12 scientists to work on a project named ESMFold, which trained a large language model capable of processing vast amounts of biological data to predict protein structures. This effort was praised by developers of new drugs and therapies. According to three informed sources, as part of company-wide layoffs, ESMFold was disbanded this spring.