There are lot of people out there who don't particularly merit the publish-or-perish ethos of academia and would rather publish only after they have something worthwhile to publish and not just footnotes to an established scheme.
E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/14/higgs-...
and so on.
Ehh. I would question that doing research is necessarily highly correlated with wanting to publish papers all the time. A lot of the work during product development is a mix of AI, UX and engineering. The entire output might definitely fall in research but the individual components of it might require way more fleshing out to bring each to publishable quality. Considering that we don't particularly have the publish or perish doctrine of academia, we are not particularly forced to publish at the same rate as there.
Let me simplify that further: "If what AI/ML talent wants is to publish...then you're right, they're not going to work at Apple". Money may or may not be a factor, but Apples secrecy won't allow the talent to publish their research. Given that AI is highly driven by research right now (no "if" about it), what talent would want to work somewhere where they can't publish research papers?