Scaling protein models by orders of magnitude unlocks emergent biological capabilities
Alex Rives · 🔬 The Bitter Lesson is Coming for Proteins - Alex Rives, BioHub · May 27, 2026 · at 1:54
Alex Rives, Head of Science at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, discusses empirical scaling laws observed across generations of Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM) protein models.
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“So our team has really explored that idea over a number of different years, and we've really kind of, I think, seen the scaling curve and really seen as we have increased models by an order of magnitude kind of in each generation that, you know, there's this emergence of new capabilities.”
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