From my experience working as an engineer in Academia, there is a big problem in anything AI related, in that anyone decent can instantly increase their pay by

From my experience working as an engineer in Academia, there is a big problem in anything AI related, in that anyone decent can instantly increase their pay by 200 -1000% just by leaving for one of the big tech companies. Half the phD students don't even bother finishing, before being given an offer they can't refuse. How can academia compete with that, given sky high student debt, an extremely uncertain path to tenure etc etc