Why haven't the academics created a non profit foundation with open source models like this then? If alphabet doesnt provide much, then they will be supplanted by non profits. I see nothing broken here.
I work at Open Force Field [1] which is the kind of nonprofit that I think you're talking about. Our sister project, OpenFold [2], is working on open source versions of AlphaFold.
We're making good progress but it's difficult to interface with fundamentally different organizational models between academia and industry. I'm hoping that this model will become normalized in the future. But it takes serious leaps of faith from all involved (professors, industry leaders, grant agencies, and - if I can flatter myself - early career scientists) to leave the "safe route" in their organizations and try something like this.
Individual labs somehow manage to do that and we're all grateful. Martin Steinegger's lab put out ColabFold, RELION is the gold standard for cryo-EM despite being academic software and the development of more recent industry competitors like cryoSPARC. Everything out of the IPD is free for academic use. Someone has to fight like hell to get all those grants, though, and from a societal perspective, it's basically needlessly redundant work.
My frustrations aren't with a lack of open source models, some poor souls make them. My disagreement is with the perception that academia has insufficient incentive to work on socially important problems. Most such problems are ONLY worked on in academia until they near the finish line. Look at Omar Yaghi's lab's work on COFs and MOFs for carbon/emission sequestration and atmospheric water harvesting. Look at all the thankless work numerous labs did on CRISPR-Cas9 before the Broad Institute even touched it. Look at Jinbo Xu's work, on David Baker's lab's and the IPD's work, etc. Look at what labs first solved critical amyloid structures, infuriatingly recently, considering the massive negative social impacts of neurodegenerative diseases.
It's only rational for companies that only care about their own profit maximization to socialize R&D costs and privatize any possible gains. This can work if companies aren't being run by absolute ghouls who aren't delaying the release of a new generation of drugs to minimize patent duration overlap or who aren't trying to push things that don't work for short-term profit. This can also work if we properly fund and credit publicly funded academic labs. This is not what's happening, however, instead public funded research is increasingly demeaned, defunded, and dismantled due to the false impression that nothing socially valuable gets done without a profit motive. It's okay, though, I guess under this kind of LSC worldview, that everything always corrects itself so preempting problems doesn't matter, we'll finally learn how much actual innovation is publicly funded when we get the Minions movie, aducanumab, and WeWork over and over again for a few decades while strangling the last bit of nature we have left.
We're making good progress but it's difficult to interface with fundamentally different organizational models between academia and industry. I'm hoping that this model will become normalized in the future. But it takes serious leaps of faith from all involved (professors, industry leaders, grant agencies, and - if I can flatter myself - early career scientists) to leave the "safe route" in their organizations and try something like this.
[1] https://openforcefield.org/ [2] https://openfold.io/