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12 Feb 2026 Latent Space đŹBeyond AlphaFold: How Boltz is Open-Sourcing the Future of Drug Discovery
âI do still think, and we will continue to put a lot of our models open source because the critical kind of role.â
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- 12 Feb 2026
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âŚoday, you know, kind of, where does the model not work, you know, and then, you know, once we have that benchmark, you know, letâs try to, through everything we, any ideas that we have of the problem. And thereâs a lot of like healthy skepticism in the field, which I think, you know, is, is, is great. And I think, you know, itâs very clear that thereâs a ton of things, the models donât really work well on, but I think one thing thatâs probably, you know, undeniable is just like the pace of, pace of progress, you know, and how, how much better weâre getting, you know, every year. And so I think if you, you know, if you assume, you know, any constant, you know, rate of progress moving forward, I think things are going to look pretty cool at some point in the future. ChatGPT was only three years ago. Yeah, I mean, itâs wild, right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, itâs one of those things. Like, youâve been doing this. Being in the field, you donât see it coming, you know? And like, I think, yeah, hopefully weâll, you know, weâll, weâll continue to have as much progress weâve had the past few years. So this is maybe an aside, but Iâm really curious, you get this great feedback from the, from the community, right? By being open source. My question is partly like, okay, yeah, if you open source and everyone can copy what you did, but itâs also maybe balancing priorities, right? Where you, like all my customers are saying. I want this, thereâs all these problems with the model. Yeah, yeah. But my customers donât care, right? So like, how do you, how do you think about that? Yeah. e you, like all my customers are saying. I want this, thereâs all these problems with the model. Yeah, yeah. But my customers donât care, right? So like, how do you, how do you think about that? Yeah. So I would say a couple of things. One is, you know, part of our goal with Bolts and, you know, this is also kind of established as kind of the mission of the public benefit company that we started is to democratize the access to these tools. But one of the reasons why we realized that Bolts needed to be a company, it couldnât just be an academic project is that putting a model on GitHub is definitely not enough to get, you know, chemists and biologists, you know, across, you know, both academia, biotech and pharma to use your model to, in their therapeutic programs. And so a lot of what we think about, you know, at Bolts beyond kind of the, just the models is thinking about all the layers. The layers that come on top of the models to get, you know, from, you know, those models to something that can really enable scientists in the industry. And so that goes, you know, into building kind of the right kind of workflows that take in kind of, for example, the data and try to answer kind of directly that those problems that, you know, the chemists and the biologists are asking, and then also kind of building the infrastructure. And so this to say that, you know, even with models fully open. You know, we see a ton of potential for, you know, products in the space and the critical part about a product is that even, you know, for example, with an open source model, you know, running the model is not free, you know, as we were saying, these are pretty expensive model and especially, and maybe weâll get into this, you know, these days weâre seeing kind of pretty dramatic inference time scaling of these models where, you know, the more you run them, the better the results are. But there, you know, you see. You start getting into a point that compute and compute costs becomes a critical factor. And so putting a lot of work into building the right kind of infrastructure, building the optimizations and so on really allows us to provide, you know, a much better service potentially to the open source models. That to say, you know, even though, you know, with a product, we can provide a much better service. I do still think, and we will continue to put a lot of our models open source because the critical kind of role. I think of open source. Models is, you know, helping kind of the community progress on the research and, you know, from which we, we all benefit. And so, you know, weâll continue to on the one hand, you know, put some of our kind of base models open source so that the field can, can be on top of it. And, you know, as we discussed earlier, we learn a ton from, you know, the way that the field uses and builds on top of our models, but then, you know, try to build a product that gives the best experience possible to scientists. d earlier, we learn a ton from, you know, the way that the field uses and builds on top of our models, but then, you know, try to build a product that gives the best experience possible to scientists. So that, you know, like a chemist or a biologist doesnât need to, you know, spin off a GPU and, you know, set up, you know, our open source model in a particular way, but can just, you know, a bit like, you know, I, even though I am a computer scientist, machine learning scientist, I donât necessarily, you know, take a open source LLM and try to kind of spin it off. But, you know, I just maybe open a GPT app or a cloud code and just use it as an amazing product. We kind of want to give the same experience. So this front world. I heard a good analogy yesterday that a surgeon doesnât want the hospital to design a scalpel, right? So just buy the scalpel. You wouldnât believe like the number of people, even like in my short time, you know, between AlphaFold3 coming out and the end of the PhD, like the number of people that would like reach out just for like us to like run AlphaFold3 for them, you know, or things like that. Just because like, you know, bolts in our case, you know, just because itâs like. Itâs like not that easy, you know, to do that, you know, if youâre not a computational person. And I think like part of the goal here is also that, you know, we continue to obviously build the interface with computational folks, but that, you know, the models are also accessible to like a larger, broader audience. And then that comes from like, you know, good interfaces and stuff like that. I think one like really interesting thing about bolts is that with the release of it, you didnât just release a model, but you created a community. Yeah. Did that community, it grew very quickly. Did that surprise you? And like, what is the evolution of that community and how is that fed into bolts? If you look at its growth, itâs like very much like when we release a new model, itâs like, thereâs a big, big jump, but yeah, itâs, I mean, itâs been great. You know, we have a Slack community that has like thousands of people on it. And itâs actually like self-sustaining now, which is like the really nice part because, you know, itâs, itâs almost overwhelming, I think, you know, to be able to like answer everyoneâs questions and help. Itâs really difficult, you know. The, the few people that we were, but it ended up that like, you know, people would answer each otherâs questions and like, sort of like, you know, help one another. And so the Slack, you know, has been like kind of, yeah, self, self-sustaining and thatâs been, itâs been really cool to see.âŚ
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