"Papers have little/no impact on perf" - this is a ridiculous and false claim.
Almost every single advancement in any field has come from academia. Sure, it may not be recognized as such by the general public because they aren't experts in the area - but the fact remains that academia is pretty much the only way to progress as a society. Companies just take what academia gives them and make products out of it for their own profit (not to completely trivialize that - it still comes with it's own set of challenges), but the private sector is completely misaligned with making real progress towards hard problems. Deepmind is one of the examples that continues to show this despite being a 'corporate entity' in that the large advancements seen are out of their employment (i.e. giving their excess of capital) of professors at universities who focus on their research.
> Almost every single advancement in any field has come from Academia
This sounds like you need far more evidence. If you say academia as the institution where you share papers, sure but then that’s just a sharing mechanism. Almost like saying all advancements came out of Internet because arxiv is where research is shared.
If you want to say professors and Universities have been heralding AI advancement, that has not been true for at least 10 years possibly more. Moment industry started getting into Academia, Academia couldn’t compete and died out. Even Transformers the founding paper of the modern GPT architectures came out of Google Research. In Vision, ResNet, MaskRCNN to Segment Anything came out of Meta / MIcrosoft. The last great academic invention might have been dropout and even that involved Apple. After that I fail to see Academia coming up with a single invention in ML that the rest of the community instantly adopted because of how good it was.
Huh? None of this is true for a lot of core recent work. A very obvious example is transformers, which did not come out of academic research (or DeepMind for that matter) at all.
