I also think this is kinda ridiculous. If anything I feel like the big consumer tech companies are disadvantaged because they need to deploy something that can scale to a billion people. They can only spend pennies per customer because the margins are so low. Sure they will have a research team for marketing purposes but when it comes to deployments they aren't doing anything too fancy.
The work coming out of companies with higher profit margins per customer are doing much more novel work from what I have seen.
All this is to say, I don't see universities getting shut out anytime soon. The necessary compute to contribute is pretty cheap and most universities either have a free cluster for students or are operating with large grants to pay for compute (or both).
The work coming out of companies with higher profit margins per customer are doing much more novel work from what I have seen.
All this is to say, I don't see universities getting shut out anytime soon. The necessary compute to contribute is pretty cheap and most universities either have a free cluster for students or are operating with large grants to pay for compute (or both).