Frankly, when I read a machine learning paper without looking at the list of authors, it is impossible to tell whether it is written by "corporate researchers"

Frankly, when I read a machine learning paper without looking at the list of authors, it is impossible to tell whether it is written by "corporate researchers" or "actual academic researchers". I'm not sure the distinction you're making is really helpful. As long as the research is published openly, peer-reviewed, discussed in conferences, whether the researchers work for the company or for a university does not make much of a difference. Most of these "corporate researchers" were top of their field in academia before joining Google, Facebook, Microsoft. Furthermore, Google also funds academic research [0]... I'm not even sure where you're getting all your information at this point. [0] https://ai.google/research/outreach/faculty-research-awards/recipients/ https://ai.google/research/outreach/faculty-research-awards/...