8 Generating protein structures
This chapter covers
- Using LLMs to generate protein structures
- Using LLMs to generate crystal structures
- Optimizing LLM inference performance for chemistry
Chapter 7 covered practical examples of domain-specific small language models (SLMs) for Python code generation and how to optimize them to run on commodity hardware, even a laptop. This chapter presents real-world examples of specialized SLMs for drug R&D and chemistry.
8.1 Applying Transformers in chemistry
In chapter 7, you saw how to overcome inference challenges using the tips and tricks introduced in the first part of this book. Before we move on to more advanced inference optimization and model quantization in the following chapters, we’ll apply these techniques to specialized SLMs in the chemistry domain to show that they aren’t limited to creating coding assistants. If chemistry is new to you, don’t worry—we’ll keep it high level and cover only what you need to follow the model descriptions and inference optimization strategies we’ll apply.