Comment by govg
3 years ago
In computer science, or more specifically in deep learning, there is a high correlation between resources you can spend / use and progress you can make. This is why all the major tech firms have a leg up, they have internal computing power and data that is impossible for any one university to have. It is also the case that a lot of professors and even students have temporary appointments with tech firms, for exactly this reason.
If you look at other fields which are not as resource intensive, university can and do contribute to the state of the art. Especially in areas like theory, where even though MSR etc do cutting edge research, the bulk of work is done at universities.
I don't think this is the only reason though. (preclinical) Bioscience experiments can be extremely expensive and yet they remain pretty concentrated at universities, for better or worse.
I don't know about the state of funding in protein folding specifically, but knowing about the kind of funding that some other high profile bio labs can get I am skeptical that material resources were the main difference between alpha fold and what the prior academic lit could do, for example.