I am a week late. Real Life Happened. :-) I probably phrased this really badly and applied it too broadly. Take the early days of Machine Learning. Everyone w

I am a week late. Real Life Happened. :-) I probably phrased this really badly and applied it too broadly. Take the early days of Machine Learning. Everyone was working to crack it open and make money off of it. They still are, but now we’re almost to the maturity portion of it’s lifecycle. But in the early days, if you were smart enough and showed promise, you could get hired before you even finished your doctorate. Everyone trying to crack open the ML egg was doing this, so not doing it gave execs FOMO about letting someone else employ a very smart ML scientist that developed something that made a lot of money. So it’s less that it’s risky but for very specific and developing areas of CS it’s considered a worthwhile expense rolling the dice to own the patents on the next big breakthrough outright for the cost of a single salary.