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A comment on AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology. Parent comment

Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by rtsil on Monday November 30, 2020 @09:50PM (#25261732)
> Interestingly, for those labs to exist, being a monopolistic megacorp is a requirement. It appears to me that today's FAANG monopoly allowed the creation of Google Deepmind and OpenAI,

AFAIK OpenAI is still independent, despite its recent closeness with Microsoft. Deepmind existed and was active well before being acquired by Google. All these to examples prove is that today's big, monopolistic corporations tend to acquire research labs, not that they are a requirement for their existence or successful activity.

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Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by nmfisher on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:01AM (#25263918)
Yeah, but both labs burn hundreds of millions of dollars. Without Google/Microsoft (not to mention Tesla/YC money), they would have died before bringing these kind of results to market.
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