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.
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.
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.