...And because they have monopoly money. Basically, research labs are usually vanity spending for corporations with too much money. Xerox parc was funded by a monopoly. Bell labs was funded by a monopoly. Google funds its moonshots with its monopoly.
How does that work when the research team moved elsewhere? Re-hire talent? That takes time - the 1 thing you don't have in a fast-moving field like AI. Post sums it up nicely:
"Do the math—how much is it worth to halve training and inference cost given that the industry has investments approaching a trillion dollars?"
How much is these researchers' salaries, compared to what MSFT spends on compute? Chances are it's peanuts in comparison.
Companies will try to ruthlessly rid themselves of labor as long as those members of labor have agency and rights.
If someone disagrees they can convince me by explaining why a company wouldn’t choose to spend X on a machine they wholly own vs X on an employee they don’t.
There’s some room for argument that employees can do more than machines can but in the current AI zeitgeist arguing that we have machines with equivalent to human intelligence I don’t see how you wouldn’t see this coming if you believed the zeitgeist.
In a way this suggests that MS doesn't aim to be a leader in AI <the core tech>. Only in its applications + related services (read: profit to be had there).
Nothing wrong with that btw. But understandable that fundamental researchers then pack up & leave.
Ah, well, good thing we've almost entirely defunded academic science.
But even in computing, when there is a promising way forward that the basic reaearch has been done on, its hard to justify side quests.