It is extremely useful for recruiting talent. Top talent wants to do basic research, so this is a powerful lure for keeping them at the company rather than in academia. I'm at NeurIPS this week, and many companies are here and they heavily advertise how many papers they have in the conference as part of their recruitment efforts for both (applied) AI research and AI engineering positions.

This is nonsense. What if this is research around problems they need to solve in order to improve their self-driving car? Because clearly that's the goal here.

Should they tell investors to patiently wait while some academic comes up with a solution to their problem?

If I were VC with stakes in uber, and they wouldn't be researching this area, I would be pretty mad.

Yet again, research and breakthrough are not made by profitable companies. And research money most often come from government with little to no incentive on ROI.