Sometimes the lines get blurred - but I don't think you can expect Google to release as much of their work for free as people who are paid via central taxes.
Worth noting that they did release the AlphaFold 2 weights after a while. Milking an expensive discovery for a limited period should be considered laudable, unless you think tax funding of all research would be awesome and it's just a weird anomaly how the org producing these results was a tiny heterodox startup very recently.
> Worth noting that they did release the AlphaFold 2 weights after a while.
Yes - though I don't think Isomorphic labs existed at that point.
Obviously the real reason AlphaFold was possible was the huge tax payer funded effort running over decades to generate a diverse, high quality 3D structure dataset.
However that's why we put taxes into research - to spur innovation in a pre-competitive way - so that's fine.
What's not fine is any benefiting company avoiding paying any tax back on resulting profits - that's just free riding - and many of the big tech companies are, in my view, guilty.
Yep not knocking alphafold - Alphafold showed it could be done[1], and others have subsequently followed.
However if all the tech companies hoover up all the profits and simultaneously avoid paying the appropriate level of taxes - then the cycle of innovation isn't sustainable. As well taxes paying for that pre-competitive data, they train the next generation of PhDs.
[1] There were other groups making progress with DL based structure prediction before Alphafold, but alphafold was a leap forward.
There are 3 basic ways to fund research.
- Taxes - most academic research
- begging - research charities
- profits - companies like Google.
Sometimes the lines get blurred - but I don't think you can expect Google to release as much of their work for free as people who are paid via central taxes.