[mNovak]

My interpretation of that moment was that they had already decided to give away protein sequences as charity, it was just a decision of all as a bundle vs fielding individual requests (a 'service').

Still great of them to do, and as can be seen it's worth it as a marketing move.

[dekhn]

(as an aside, this is a common thing that comes up when you have a good model: do you make a server that allows people to do one-off or small-scale predictions, or do you take a whole query set and run it in batch and save the results in a database; this comes up a lot)