In August 2023, Meta disbanded a research team of a dozen scientists that had trained an AI large language model for biology—as part of Mark Zuckerberg's “year of efficiency” that led to over 20,000 layoffs.
But Alexander Rives, who led the research cohort known as Meta’s “AI protein team,” was not deterred by Meta’s move. He immediately spun up a startup with a core group of his former Meta colleagues, called EvolutionaryScale, to continue their work building large language models that, instead of generating text, images or video, generate recipes for entirely new proteins.
