> Chemists published freely until dyes started being worth money

Notably this is exactly what patents are intended to combat. And while US IP law is clearly very broken it does at least largely accomplish this stated goal. Much (but certainly not all) industrial chemistry has made it into the academic literature.

Not that the same logic necessarily applies to AI research (ie algorithms aka math and their implementations). And I'm actually happy about that because the cost of doing the research is so much lower. There's a long list of reasons that the average person living in a residential area can't do industrial chemistry as a hobby.

To your dye example, yttrium indium manganese blue was the first commercially viable inorganic blue pigment discovered in ~200 years, is the only known environmentally safe one, and was openly published in the literature. It's also under an exclusive license. (TBF though unless the chemical is unusually difficult to synthesize not publishing would be rather pointless in this day and age given the utterly absurd capabilities of modern analytical techniques.)