Google DeepMind unveils next generation of drug discovery AI model.
| Photo Credit: AP

Google Deepmind has unveiled the third major version of its “AlphaFold” artificial intelligence model, designed to help scientists design drugs and target disease more effectively.

In 2020, the company made a significant advance in molecular biology by using AI to successfully predict the behaviour of microscopic proteins.

With the latest incarnation of AlphaFold, researchers at DeepMind and sister company Isomorphic Labs – both overseen by cofounder Demis Hassabis – have mapped the behaviour for all of life’s molecules, including human DNA.

The interactions of proteins – from enzymes crucial to the human metabolism, to the antibodies that fight infectious diseases – with other molecules is key to drug discovery and development.

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DeepMind said the findings, published in research journal Nature on Wednesday, would reduce the time and money needed to develop potentially life-changing treatments.

“With these new capabilities, we can design a molecule that will bind to a specific place on a protein, and we can predict how strongly it will bind,” Hassabis said in a press briefing on Tuesday.

“It’s a critical step if you want to design drugs and compounds that will help with disease.”

The company also announced the release of the “AlphaFold server”, a free online tool that scientists can use to test their hypotheses before running real-world tests.

Since 2021, AlphaFold’s predictions have been freely accessible to non-commercial researchers, as part of a database containing more than 200 million protein structures, and has been cited thousands of times in others’ work.

DeepMind said the new server required less computing knowledge, allowing researchers to run tests with just a few clicks of a button.

John Jumper, a senior research scientist at DeepMind, said: “It’s going to be really important how much easier the AlphaFold server makes it for biologists – who are experts in biology, not computer science – to test larger, more complex cases.”

Dr Nicole Wheeler, an expert in microbiology at the University of Birmingham, said AlphaFold 3 could significantly speed up the drug discovery pipeline, as “physically producing and testing biological designs is a big bottleneck in biotechnology at the moment”.

Google has subpoenaed service-recommendation site Yelp and the alliance.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Yelp and a coalition of news organizations have asked a US judge to disqualify a prominent US law firm from defending Google in the Justice Department’s ad tech lawsuit, saying the firm has a conflict of interest because it previously was their advocate on matters related to the case.

Yelp and News/Media Alliance, which are not defendants in the litigation but are targets of Google’s subpoenas, argue that law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison should be disqualified.

Google has subpoenaed service-recommendation site Yelp and the alliance for information to challenge claims it has abused its market dominance for web advertising.

“This case involves a major law firm switching sides against former clients” to represent an alleged monopolist, attorneys for Yelp and the media group told US District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Friday.

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A spokesperson for Paul Weiss said the “firm’s representation of Google is appropriate in all respects.”

Yelp declined to comment beyond its court filing. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bid to toss Paul Weiss is the latest flashpoint over ethics in the litigation, one of two US cases accusing Google of antitrust violations. Google has denied any wrongdoing.

Yelp said it hired Paul Weiss in 2016 for counsel on antitrust issues. The Justice Department’s antitrust head, Jonathan Kanter, was on the Paul Weiss team representing Yelp.

Google wants Yelp to divulge information about its advertising technology business and other topics, the attorneys for Yelp and New/Media Alliance, Charles Molster III and Brandon Kressin, said.

Google is also seeking information about Yelp’s engagement letters, invoices and bills related to its Paul Weiss ties.

This month, Brinkema refused a request from Google to block Kanter from leading the case. Google argued Kanter should be barred based on his work in private practice for Yelp and other Google critics.

New York-based Paul Weiss, which has about 1,000 lawyers globally, is also representing Amazon.com in various antitrust lawsuits.

The trial in the ad tech case is expected to begin next year.

The case is United States et al v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, No. 1:23-cv-00108-LMB-JFA.

The government is seeking to show that Alphabet’s Google broke antitrust law to maintain its dominance in online search. (File)
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

The US Justice Department on Monday objected to removing the public from the court during some discussions of how Google prices online advertising, one of the issues at the heart of the antitrust trial under way in Washington.

The government is seeking to show that Alphabet’s Google broke antitrust law to maintain its dominance in online search. The search dominance led to fast-increasing advertising revenues that made Google a $1 trillion company.

David Dahlquist, speaking for the government, pointed to a document that was redacted that had a short back and forth about Google’s pricing for search advertising.

Dahlquist then argued to Judge Amit Mehta, who will decide the case, that information like the tidbit in the document should not be redacted. “This satisfies public interest because it’s at the core of the DOJ case against Google,” he said.

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Speaking for Google, John Schmidtlein urged that all discussions of pricing be in a closed session, which means the public and reporters must leave the courtroom.

It is not unusual in merger trials for information like market share and business and pricing strategies to be redacted.

And sometimes the redactions are broader since, essentially, the companies want the information hidden and the government lawyers fighting the merger are working flat out to win rather than worrying about over-sealing, said Katherine Van Dyck, an experienced litigator and senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

“Litigation is a pretty grueling process,” she said.

Her organisation has pushed for the trial to be put onto telephone lines, as pre-trial hearings were because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Judge Mehta denied that motion.

Van Dyck believes that Mehta’s call was the wrong one.

“When you have these cases with massive, broad public interest and public import, the courts need to do a better job of taking that into account, change their rules and keep up with modern technology,” she said.

Case in point was testimony given early Monday by a Verizon executive, Brian Higgins, about the company’s decision to always pre-install Google’s Chrome browser with Google search on its mobile phones.

After about 30 minutes of testimony, Higgins’ testimony was closed for the next two hours.

It’s possible that he was asked about Google’s payments to Verizon but the public will never know. Those payments – which the government said are $10 billion annually to mobile carriers and others – helped the California-based tech giant win powerful default positions on smartphones and elsewhere.

Throughout the trial, Google’s defense is that its high market share reflects the quality of its product rather than any illegal actions to build monopolies in some aspects of its business.

The antitrust fight could change the future of the internet, now dominated by four giants that have been under scrutiny from Congress and antitrust enforcers since the Trump administration. Companies have defended themselves by emphasising that their services are free, as in the case of Google, or inexpensive, as in the case of Amazon.com.

If Google is found to have broken the law, Judge Mehta, who is deciding the case, will then consider how best to resolve it. He may decide simply to order Google to stop practices he has found to be illegal or he may order Google to sell assets.

The Google case centers on the government’s contention that it illegally forged its domination of online search. (File)
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Google faces its biggest ever legal challenge in a Washington court on Tuesday, as it fends off accusations from the US government that it acted unlawfully to build its overwhelming dominance of online search.

Over ten weeks of testimony involving more than 100 witnesses, Google will try to persuade a federal judge that the landmark case brought by the Department of Justice is without merit.

The trial is the biggest US antitrust case against a big tech company since the same department took on Microsoft more than two decades ago over the dominance of its Windows operating system.

“Technology has progressed a lot in 20 years so what results from this case will have a strong bearing on how tech platforms operate in the future,” said John Lopatka, from Penn State’s School of Law.

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The Google case centers on the government’s contention that it illegally forged its domination of online search by entering into exclusive contracts with device makers, mobile operators and other companies that left rivals no chance to compete.

Through these payments of billions of dollars every year to Apple, Samsung or carriers like T-Mobile or AT&T, Google secured its search engine default status on phones and web browsers and allegedly guaranteed its success to the detriment of competitors.

“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet,” the Justice Department said in its lawsuit. “That Google is long gone.”

The biggest alleged victims in the case are rival search engines that have yet to scratch out a meaningful market share against Google, like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo.

90 percent share 

Google remains the world’s preeminent search engine, capturing 90 percent of the market in the United States and across the globe, much of which comes through mobile usage on iPhones and phones running on Google-owned Android.

In its defense the company contends that its success is due to the unbeatable quality of its search engine that has been judged a cut above the rest since its launch in 1998 by founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page.

“In sum, people don’t use Google because they have to — they use it because they want to,” said Kent Walker, Google president of global affairs in a blog post.

The trial will be presided over and decided by Judge Amit P. Mehta, whose ruling would come many months after the roughly three months of hearings.

The stakes for Google are enormous if Mehta upholds any or all of the US government’s arguments.

Remedial action could involve a break up of Google’s far flung business or an order to revamp the way it operates.

The company has faced major legal action in Europe, where it was fined more than 8.2 billion euros ($8.8 billion) for various antitrust violations, although those decisions are under appeal.

Whatever Mehta ends up deciding, the US case will almost certainly be appealed by either side, potentially dragging the case on for years.

Launched in 1998, Washington’s case against Microsoft ended in a settlement in 2001 after an appeal reversed an order that the company be split up.

The US government launched its case against Google during the Trump administration and the suit carried over in the transition to President Joe Biden.

Biden has also made a point of challenging tech giants, but with little to show for it.

In January, Biden’s Department of Justice launched a separate case against Google involving its advertising business and this could go to trial next year.

The company also faces other lawsuits from US states that accuse it of abusing monopolies in ad tech and for blocking competition in its Google Play app store.

Google and the states said on Tuesday that they had reached an agreement in principle to settle the Google Play case.