At the end of the day, all of the noise of negativity and bad press is being drowned out by incredible demos. I don't know what to chalk this up to if not jealousy. Most people in the ML-o-sphere are ignoring it.
At the end of the day, all that matters is: are users using what you built?
You chose industry over academia, and that's fine. It lines up with your values. But realize that not everyone shares those values and beliefs. To some, the act of discovering a new thing is much more important than the users using said discovery. And that lines up with academia more so than the industry.
Both are different. Both are valid.
> At the end of the day, all that matters is: are users using what you built?
How would you measure Isaac Newton's advances in calculus and mechanics or Einstein's general theory of relativity, against say, a web app with a billion users?
If you want to steelman the GP's argument, you should compare the web app with e.g. some niche in pure math. There the trade off between novelty/interest and usefulness to people today is more clear.
I think the two are incomparable and both useful, but it's disingenuous to strawman the GP as saying web apps are more useful than relativity.
Yes, I picked those two examples for the effect or as a reduction to the absurd (not a strawman), because going only by the immediate or tangible value of what one "builds" (science isn't even built, but rather discovered) is not a good way to dismiss academia.
When most folks think of academia they think faculty, but staff vastly outnumber then. Contrary to popular belief there are legions of cold, level headed, engineers that get shit done.
A lot of the research isn't some random study of something that may or may not be useful in half a century or more, it's often immediately applicable and winds up in products or shaping government policy on a global scale. Especially the well funded ones.
But we don't hear about that stuff. We hear what the media and tech companies are currently trying to cram down our throats.
Ah yes, the Kardashian model of success
> None of it would be possible without academia though. Industry just applies academic research.
Meh, that vastly oversells academic research. Very little of academic research in computer science is actually used in the industry. It's not that the industry is ignorant, but rather that the majority of academic work is useless: They create artificial problems [1] and solve them in shoddy ways, with hand-picked benchmark results, and frequently without even publishing the source code.
It's probably not surprising, given that the typical incentive is to get a PhD. So you need a "problem" that can reliably be solved in 3-5 years and which allows you to produce 5-10 conference papers with your name on it.
[1] I'm not talking about theoretical fields – my comment is purely about supposedly practical research.
I was once watching a VC interview a snooty machine vision scientist at Johns Hopkins who was talking up how well his research was at recognizing three d things. So the VC pulled out his cellphone and took a photo of a box on the table. He asked the professor to have the software highlight the rectangular solid. Whoop. He never heard back. The software in the lab that was supposedly so great couldn't do a very basic task that wasn't from its preapproved set of tasks.
I do think that academia can be the source of some great ideas, but they often end up believing their own BS.
I worked at Google and there's just tons of stuff that never actually existed in academia and was created, launched, and then replaced by something better entirely within the company without any publications!