What an ill informed comment - Google, Microsoft, Facebook are among the largest producers of original research in CS, especially for machine learning these day

What an ill informed comment - Google, Microsoft, Facebook are among the largest producers of original research in CS, especially for machine learning these days. You can look at any major conference in the last few years, and it will not be surprising to see one or two of these names being at the top in terms of papers contributed. You're partially right if the argument is "basic research" = less applied fields / "purer" math, but even there Microsoft research has been a significant player in the TCS and optimization community. A lot of the current research done at universities is also funded by these organizations, either via grants (monetary or equipment like from Nvidia) to research labs, or scholarships and financial support to students. A large part of AI advancement in the past few years have been precisely because of the amount of effort these firms have put in (along with a lot of others, they are just the most public).