DeepMind and Biohub researchers say scaling alone won't solve biology

Key points

• Sal Candido says the key is finding a scaling law, where more compute and data reliably yield better results.
• Candido reports that lower-quality metagenomic sequences still improve protein language models for designing and understanding proteins.
• Pushmeet Kohli says AlphaFold relied on existing PDB data because the team lacked resources to expand it by an order of magnitude.

Why it matters for marketers: Teams covering AI biology claims should weigh data quality and problem fit, not just model size or data volume.