There are some points in the middle, but it's rare. I work on one of these [1]. We've been building the system for over ten years, and are starting to see some

There are some points in the middle, but it's rare. I work on one of these [1]. We've been building the system for over ten years, and are starting to see some truly killer apps being built on top of it [2, 3]. While it has some great benefits once you arrive, the upfront costs are enormous. You need to find a funding source (or sources) that will pay for this product while you're building it. Also, in order for the research payoff to be worth it, you need both the product itself, and subsequent innovations it enables, to be research-worthy. Not all areas of research can support this. On top of it all, even when you do this, you'll still spend years of effort in activities that are essentially not research. You're basically responsible for all of your own customer support, sales, marketing, etc.---like a startup, but without the financial upside if you succeed. Yes there is recognition and so on, but the payoffs aren't as dramatic. Most people aren't ready to commit to this path. Keep in mind that you can't build this in 5 years either. So a single generation of PhD students can't get it done. The only reason we were successful is because the key staff on the project stuck around for 5+ years after our PhDs because we all believed in doing the work. Given all that, I don't hold it against people at all who just want to build prototypes and then move on to the next thing. It's way less risky and higher reward relative to the costs. [1]: https://legion.stanford.edu/ https://legion.stanford.edu/ [2]: https://flexflow.ai/ https://flexflow.ai/ [3]: https://developer.nvidia.com/cunumeric https://developer.nvidia.com/cunumeric