The article then goes on to describe a not very general set of circumstances
> But in part due to the canonicalization of CASP, protein structure prediction effectively has a two-year clock cycle, where separate research groups guard their discoveries until after CASP results are announced.
and further noting
> As I discussed earlier, it is clear that between the Xu and Zhang groups enough was known to develop a system that would have perhaps rivaled AlphaFold.
Finally, and rather crushingly for your thesis, is the points made about the real industrial groups:
> What is worse than academic groups getting scooped by DeepMind? The fact that the collective powers of Novartis, Pfizer, etc, with their hundreds of thousands (~million?) of employees, let an industrial lab that is a complete outsider to the field, with virtually no prior molecular sciences experience, come in and thoroughly beat them on a problem that is, quite frankly, of far greater importance to pharmaceuticals than it is to Alphabet. It is an indictment of the laughable “basic research” groups of these companies, which pay lip service to fundamental science but focus myopically on target-driven research that they managed to so badly embarrass themselves in this episode.
> But in part due to the canonicalization of CASP, protein structure prediction effectively has a two-year clock cycle, where separate research groups guard their discoveries until after CASP results are announced.
and further noting
> As I discussed earlier, it is clear that between the Xu and Zhang groups enough was known to develop a system that would have perhaps rivaled AlphaFold.
Finally, and rather crushingly for your thesis, is the points made about the real industrial groups:
> What is worse than academic groups getting scooped by DeepMind? The fact that the collective powers of Novartis, Pfizer, etc, with their hundreds of thousands (~million?) of employees, let an industrial lab that is a complete outsider to the field, with virtually no prior molecular sciences experience, come in and thoroughly beat them on a problem that is, quite frankly, of far greater importance to pharmaceuticals than it is to Alphabet. It is an indictment of the laughable “basic research” groups of these companies, which pay lip service to fundamental science but focus myopically on target-driven research that they managed to so badly embarrass themselves in this episode.