I think it's arguably the exact opposite. It would have been surprising if medical companies had proven machine learning can model protein folding so much better before the world's leading AI research group could. The demonstration was one of machine learning research being applied to medical problems not medical research being applied to machine learning problems so DeepMind was the one with the head start on expertise.
And let's not forget that deep learning started really exploding and becoming mainstream around 2015-2016. I'm not sure how you could expect someone like Pfizer to hire top experts and build a competitive lab in such a short time, particularly since, Pfizer would want these people to focus exclusively on biotech, which would not be that attractive to most deep learning researchers.
> It's a lack of vision and leadership from pharma labs.
That's probably true, but I don't think Pfizer could have beat DeepMind, even if they had really tried. DeepMind is in a unique position to recruit lots of young deep learning researchers.
