I don't know how it compares in software, I worked for a professor in undergrad who was in microelectronics. I was astonished at how much of their time was taken up by grant writing and applying for funding. The pressure for research professors to support their position was immense.
There's a lot of reasons to hate FB, a lot of reasons to be wary of what comes out of their research. But to castigate researchers that cash-spewing tech titans create a better environment and experience for researchers than the public and universities feels a bit asinine. I've known too many starving grad students, post docs, and non-tenure professors to prefer people subject themselves to the system we have rather than what a company like FB wants to provide.
1. Industry funding comes with its own set of hassles. And overhead is still a thing for industry funding - sometimes the overhead rate is less, but there's been a lot more pushback against this from universities (which I actually think is quite fair).
2. Being able to buy out teaching loads is a function of funding, not necessarily this funding
3. In many institutions, salaries are fixed - what this does is cover a percentage of your salary you don't have to cover from other mechanisms, or let you buy out teaching, as you note. It would be interesting to know if the dual FAIR appointments work like that or not.
While private funding is awesome, and these labs are in a very good position, it should be noted that in most cases in my experience between NSF/NIH-style funding and an industry grant, the government grants last longer, are more flexible, and less of a hassle administratively.
For instance, I assume that grant writing is such a hassle, the average person would accept just to get out of writing grants. But the guys and gals that they picked up are at the top of their field. Would they also have the same constraints? Seems like they would have higher hit rates, less teaching and so forth.
I think the ability to launch the careers of their grad students, get them hired etc might be at the top, but I am just guessing.
There is no free lunch in raising money for research.
1) Much less, if any, grant writing. A standard NSF $500K 3 year grant provides a lab about $100K per year (due to university overhead). This will support 1-2 PhD students on a pittance of a stipend.
2) Less teaching (1 course once a year)
3) Computing resources that are far greater than you could get a grant for. One NVIDIA DGX-1 is about $100K. Very hard to get a grant for something like that. Companies have far greater resources than just one DGX-1
4) Access to software engineering personnel to help with research
5) Access to data, and the ability to create new datasets. Many datasets cost over $100K to make (e.g., those for semantic segmentation). Very hard to get a grant to make a dataset (I've tried)
6) Much better media relations to popularize your research
7) Bigger salary
A big part of this, in my opinion, is just that FB funds their labs. Getting government funding for a lab is difficult and frustrating and must be done continually, especially for these professors that run huge labs. NSF has a 7-15% success rate, and it can take a lot of effort to write a decent proposal. Including teaching regularly, this takes a lot of time from actual research. What these professors, I think, are negotiating is only teaching one semester a year and having a spigot of cash to fund their labs. They also gain access to massive amounts of data and computing resources.
Other companies don't seem to be as open to this arrangement as FB, but it has a lot of appeal to me (although I'm not a lover of FB).