[dna_polymerase]

Have a look at this discussion and the article from earlier today [0]. Of course, a singular lab could compete with something DeepMind does, but not without massive amounts of money in their pockets. The state of the art has become pretty expensive, really fast.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486163

[Yajirobe]

State of the art can be (and usually is) born in academic labs.

[markchen90]

I don't think this is true. The ResNet was born at Microsoft, DQN was born at Deepmind, the Transformer was born at Google, and GPT2 was born at OpenAI.

I'm obviously biased since I work at an industry AI lab, but we both have important roles to play.

[stonogo]

ResNet lead authors were from UC San Diego and the Transformer was a collaboration with U Toronto. There absolutely is innovation coming from industrial labs, but industrial ties to academia run deep -- especially at Stanford-born Google and affiliated organizations.