One thing that DeepMind demonstrated was that sometimes one well funded team is much better than 50 poorly funded teams.
I say this as an academic, of course.
In any case, left to their own devices, corporate R&D teams wouldn’t be able to define goals that work for their business. Like without the competition and goals being defined for them, DeepMind would be having meetings with brand managers about the avant- grade of ad tracking.
Getting an education (even an advanced one) is a completely separate thing than entering academia and I suspect you know this.
This is the same energy as saying that being the son of an incredibly rich person is a completely separate thing than being rich.
Private companies are much more efficient in reaching a well-defined goal.
Academia is much more efficient in reaching ill-defined goals.
The thing is that the majority of goals for basic science are very ill-defined and virtually all breakthroughs are serendipitous (reaching from antibiotics to more recently CRISPR-Cas). So I don't think it makes sense to advocate for one vs the other.
Science is pretty difficult frankly, especially these days. Sure science is worth doing, and can be quite rewarding, no doubt. But I can't quite understand the popularity. Writing papers is particularly painful, again I can't understand why there are so many papers being written, it is torrential. As others have noted, this is not the same as actual progress. But lately I have noticed something telling about several leading researchers in my field, people who have made it in every sense of the word, work at the top institutions, regularly publish stunning research in Science, Nature. They have been moving to the pharmaceutical industry in significant numbers. This tells you, basically, that academia sucks for everyone. This is also my impression from talking to people who have entered research in the last 15 years. The older researchers seem happier. Perhpas it is the pay scales that scale with seniority, or just survivorship bias.
Any bit of research into this (and most of their successes in other fields) will show otherwise.
Or you could supply references and/or an argument. The "if you researched this you'd agree with my claims" approach is pretty pernicious.
Everyone knows that Deepmind hires experts in deep learning, as well as subject matter experts. The idea that their success is just because of compute power alone is preposterous.
Even the article that this comment thread is about has extensive speculation about the techniques Deepmind used. There’s clearly a high level of anticipation to read their paper.
Those higher salaries don't result in better research results - but merely as a way to move the most prolific researchers from other institutions to them...
Arguably this extra funding isn't leading to many new discoveries, but just shifting where discoveries are made.
Concentrating all these prolific researchers in one place, removing the publish-or-perish incentive, and giving them access to unlimited data and computing power.
Seems like that could make a difference.
[1] Standard caveats apply and the point stands. [2] Standard caveats apply and the point stands.