[dekhn]

I woudl say that the Ads model at Google represents a truly non-academic set of discoveries. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... and https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... are two of the most significant papers published in ML (and truly underappreciated, IMHO) and represent decades of people time developing new ideas in industry.

I worked at Google and there's just tons of stuff that never actually existed in academia and was created, launched, and then replaced by something better entirely within the company without any publications!