In a lot of cases, you won't notice the result of every dollar spent on R&D (until much later on, when the technology becomes mainstream). For e.g. siri: might

In a lot of cases, you won't notice the result of every dollar spent on R&D (until much later on, when the technology becomes mainstream). For e.g. siri: might just seem like voice-to-text to you, but there's probably a ton of stuff happening in the backend in the fields of ai, scalability, personalization of the results, etc. Some of this stuff might have been known problems with known solutions, other things might have been applied research.