Alex Rives, pioneer of protein language model ESM, named to TIME100 AI

proteinrosh · x · 2026-08-28

Alex Rives, Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Biohub team have been named to TIME's TIME100 AI 2026 list.

Rives pioneered Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM) at Meta — the first language model for understanding proteins, a breakthrough bridging computer science and biology. Earlier this year he unveiled ESMFold2, a database of a billion proteins and their structures, already a powerful tool for drug developers. He sees proteins as the building blocks of life, arguing life is fundamentally programmable and that the deep patterns in protein sequence and structure are learnable.

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