amusingly, I work for a pharma and they don't even return our calls. I wonder how seriously they take this business, because if I was selling a product based on this, pharma would be my first customer.
Could be wrong but I think Deepmind sees more value in elite AI/ML talent that Alphafold will draw and help retain than future potential profits on drug discovery. Open sourcing Alphafold and removing commercial restrictions wouldn't make much sense if drug profits were their goal.
Sure. AlphaFold is, in fact, the greatest shot at revenue that DeepMind has shown so far (and they are under intense pressure from Alphabet to show revenue).
I don't think there is any pressure on that front. They are supposedly profitable now (though i'm guessing this is partially accounting tricks) but there just isn't a need to be profitable. Search and Youtube print money to fund their R&D ($31B last year alone). The goal is AGI or close to it.
The "profit" you're pointing at is money that Google pays DeepMind to do software and machine learning as a service for them. This pays off, for example with Jax, where nobody in Google Research could touch it because Jeff Dean/Tensorflow, until DM demonstrated (with alphafold) that Jax could do nobel-prize-winning research, to the point where Jeff has admitted that tensorflow has serious problems and systems like jax are the future (see the palm paper!!!)
