Well, a lot of / most of deep machine learning breakthroughs are coming directly from research scientists at Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, (other major tech companies) or research organizations associated with them or their executives.
It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually.
Whilst modern economics and the startup model makes it easier for companies to let startups do the actual idea testing (and then buy up the successful experiments), there's a ton of companies that are still driving entire industries with their corporate-funded research.
We should also probably note that a lot of the funding for some very successful academic labs comes from these large corporations as well.
It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually.
Whilst modern economics and the startup model makes it easier for companies to let startups do the actual idea testing (and then buy up the successful experiments), there's a ton of companies that are still driving entire industries with their corporate-funded research.
We should also probably note that a lot of the funding for some very successful academic labs comes from these large corporations as well.