Alex Rives
Head of Science at Biohub; founder and former chief scientist of EvolutionaryScale, developer of ESM3
Alex Rives is the Head of Science at Biohub, where Rives leads work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology. Rives was a founder and the chief scientist of EvolutionaryScale, the developer of the ESM3 and ESM Cambrian protein language models, which is now part of Biohub. Biohub's biography also lists Rives as a Core Institute Member at the Broad Institute and an Assistant Professor in EECS at MIT.12
Career
Rives started and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling project at Meta's fundamental AI research lab, which built transformer language models trained on protein sequences. Rives was then a founder and the chief scientist of EvolutionaryScale, a public-benefit company developing AI for biology.1
EvolutionaryScale is now part of Biohub, and its ESM models and services are offered through Biohub. As Head of Science, Rives leads Biohub's work combining artificial intelligence and biology.124
Research
Rives was the first author of the paper showing that biological structure and function emerge from unsupervised learning on 250 million protein sequences, the work behind the ESM-1b model. Later work led to ESM-2 and ESMFold, which predicts protein structure directly from a sequence using the ESM-2 language model.5
The ESM3 preprint, with Rives as senior author, presents a model that reasons jointly over protein sequence, structure and function. EvolutionaryScale used ESM3 to design esmGFP, a new green fluorescent protein generated with chain-of-thought prompting.32
Work
ESM3Open weights
Senior author of the 2024 ESM3 preprint, which describes a generative language model that reasons over protein sequence, structure and function; the open small ESM3 model is released with source code on GitHub.324
ESM-2 and ESMFold (external site: github.com)Open weights
Senior author of the paper introducing ESM-2 and ESMFold, released through the Meta FAIR protein team's MIT-licensed ESM repository, which pairs the ESM-2 language model with end-to-end structure prediction from a single sequence.5
ESM CambrianOpen weights
EvolutionaryScale introduced ESM Cambrian in 2024 as a model family for protein representation learning, released at 300M, 600M and 6B parameters under the MIT license.6
ESM3 open small (esm3-sm-open-v1)Open weights
Last-listed author of the ESM3 paper in Science (doi:10.1126/science.ads0018), which the ESM3 README in the Biohub/esm repository asks users to cite.7
Career timeline
Dec 2020
The ESM repository added the ESM-1b protein language model described in Rives et al.5
Aug 2022
The ESM-2 protein language models were released through the ESM repository.5
Nov 2022
ESMFold, an end-to-end structure prediction model built on ESM-2, was released.5
2024
EvolutionaryScale introduced the ESM Cambrian protein representation models.6
Jul 2, 2024
Posted the ESM3 preprint on simulating protein evolution with a language model as senior author.3
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Founder and chief scientist, EvolutionaryScale12
- Started and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM) project, Meta Fundamental AI Research15
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