State of Wall in Protein Language Models in 2026

Last year Pascal Notin wrote a great post summarizing important observation about AI + proteins: Have we hit the scaling wall for protein language models? . (Spoiler: the answer is ‘yes’) Briefest summary if you didn’t read it: PLMs’ performance on fitness prediction (‘transferability’ of skills) plateaus after 1B and declines after 5B parameters. This holds for multiple PLM families leading…