The deepmind research team is essentially all PhD though, so it seems academia isn't doing such a bad job.
There’s a reason these PhDs at Google mind aren’t in academia after all doing the same work
It happens that the team at deepmind is apparently pretty damn good at deep learning problems, so they're going faster than matching academia labs.
It's not to say that academia has none of the problems you mentioned, but it's imo unreasonable to expect that, in a world where both public and private labs exist, only public ones would make advances.