I don't know dude, if there weren't such lucrative jobs for academics at places like Google and pharmaceutical research companies, the discourse wouldn't be so narrowly focused on doing blah blah neural networks on huge libraries of images and molecular hashes.

People with academic backgrounds would be less afraid to point out how much vaporware machine learning has produced. They'd take stock in that their tenure, or six year PhDs, give them an opportunity to not chase trends so aggressively. They'd shill online less, for some giant faceless corporation like Google.

I'm not going to shit on a bunch of great stuff people have made. But the scary thing is that Noam Chomsky is probably right, that AI science hasn't advanced much at all. That we're still in an AI winter where it matters, the science, despite all the money and attention.