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ESM-2

Meta
open weights / Overall score: 2.6

ESM-2 is Meta's masked-language model family for protein sequences. The family spans several parameter sizes and produces representations that can be fine-tuned for protein prediction tasks; the Hugging Face release includes downloadable PyTorch, TensorFlow, and safetensors checkpoints and points to task-specific fine-tuning notebooks.

Verified 2026-09-10 via the Hugging Face model card and repository manifest.

Openness

3 high confidence
3.0
weights
open(MIT ungated PyTorch, TensorFlow, and safetensors files)
data
closed(card points to the paper rather than releasing the pretraining corpus)
code
partial(inference and fine-tuning integrations without pretraining pipeline)
license
MIT(OSI)

ESM-2 is an openly licensed and widely mirrored checkpoint family, but neither the training corpus nor a reproducible pretraining pipeline ships with this release.

Adoption

4 high confidence
4.0

1,274,116 downloads in the trailing 30 days for the declared 650M checkpoint alone.

Capability

2 high confidence
2.0

One readable attribute puts ESM-2 two rungs below Prithvi-EO; broad downstream applicability is not converted into extra features.

Verified 2026-09-10