> Nowadays, he couldn't do the research work he did there and at other places at any big IT company - it's R&D, with the emphasis on "D".
I, on the other hand, am amazed by the progress being done today, and the research paper released on an almost weekly basis by companies like Google, Microsoft and co. Just look at the language and image models that are released, the progress on computer vision etc.
I played with the playground of OpenAI GPT-3 and I am blown away at the result. It's not perfect, but it's orders of magnitude better than what we had easily access to just few month ago. I have started using it in my day-to-day life on some specific tasks, and I can't wait to see the next versions. I can't even start to fathom the amazing products people are going to build around it in the next decade.
It's absolutely true that these models/research serve the purpose of the company building them... but even Leslie says in the video that he did his entire career in the industry because that's where he saw many interesting challenges, and that his whole research was a means to an end.
R&D is still alive and kicking, and is going faster than ever. You might just be looking at the past with rose tainted glasses, and needlessly undermining the present.