> I'm really confused. When looking at artificial intelligence it seems that actually we have dominating corporate labs which through integrated services (such as compute and data), totally dominate academia.
But this is just one unique case - where access to a lot of data and a lot of compute makes a huge difference.
I'm not sure that it translates to many other fields in CS.
Corporate research is still going to somewhat be at the whimsy of what's bleeding edge AND has some applicable value; the idea of it just is a little different with things like the 10% or 20% "constructive free-time" model. Each engineer in FAANG-like companies just get a 10-20% salary allotment instead of the equivalent expense of researcher headcount. The idea of "constructive free time" for work is just the "agile" iteration of the research lab.
But this is just one unique case - where access to a lot of data and a lot of compute makes a huge difference.
I'm not sure that it translates to many other fields in CS.